"The city, a village of flower and knife, stride and caress, love's moan and gunshot sound, whip and surdo drumstick, is unsettling."- Luiz Antônio Simas

 

In the Western tradition, from which we inherit, imprecision can be considered a mistake, a deviation from the harmonious standard that has enriched Plato's Theory of Beauty over the centuries. Much later, with the advent of avant-garde movements and the successive transformations in the context of Visual Arts, considering the existence of a pattern for artistic form and demanding harmony from it results in an empty exercise of time. Against the current of seeking a supposed conformity in painting, Beto Fame establishes in his latest series of works an investigation into time and form, in a context rooted in urban experiences.

 

Beto Fame is a Rio de Janeiro-based artist who grew up in the North Zone of the city, a place with a high flow of people and a large population. The streets of Tijuca were his first art school, intersections of avenues and partnerships with other artists contributed to his understanding of the spatiality of painting, the social dimension of color, and the importance of cultural elements that permeate the daily life of Rio de Janeiro residents. Subsequently, his education in architecture– and passage through the School of Fine Arts– can be understood as a theoretical assimilation of the city and the systematization of street thinking. Peculiarly, urban life has become a central point for his poetics, and since earlier series like "Shangri-la," canvas painting occurs in the artist's research as a result of the enchantment provoked by the city.

 

In more recent research, the discovery of collage has led the artist to a new understanding of image structuring. His paintings, which previously asserted the monumentality of objects, such as on walls, now make way for a more profound significance that does not have an immediate relationship with the thing itself. Just as a casual walk through the streets does not reveal the surprises of the path in advance, collage also stems from an active search process for an image that gives meaning to the process. The final image explains the journey through its marks, choices, and obstacles. The practice of collage for the artist has established itself as a place of experimentation that resulted in a liberation from architectural rigor and the presence of the real city.

 

The return to painting is structured from a logic of collage and culminates in the works we see in this exhibition. In the canvases, whose color palette is not urban, we perceive non-negotiable image references for Beto. In one dimension, we observe the execution of the gesture reminiscent of Lúcia Laguna, or, even as part of the background ensemble, the modern appeal that seasons form and color, making us see the ghosts of Guignard, Portinari, and the elegantly precise strokes of modernist architects like Jorge Moreira.

 

This exhibition deals with the encounter of the present with an unavoidable past that is felt at every moment in the artist's daily life, from his daily journey from home to the studio– a building intensely marked by modern values. Here, in the presented paintings, the artist's reflection does not anchor in Platonic harmony; there are no symmetries and patterns to admire. Like a city in constant transformation, Beto Fame's works sharpen our gaze, making us perceive the disagreements of daily life as significant parts of life itself. Although the landscapes, vegetation, and forms are abstractions of the world, the paintings mimic life poetically and reveal other ways of experiencing the city, relationships, and time, even if it constitutes a Brief Disharmony.

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Shannon Botelho 

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Atelie 31 - Rio de Janeiro, BR - 2023