Jornais + Pau-bonito

Jornais [Newspapers] began with a newspaper that I painted black, then another to which I glued aluminum tape, then another that I painted mixing white and black on the spot, and that's when I realized that I could leave pieces of color unpainted and paint the rest white. So I have been drawing with erasure and building other things; other forms and other meanings have arisen, far less imposing than the original content, far beyond the idea of ​​truth and, perhaps for this reason, closer. The paint I use is the same one used to paint walls—white. 

Pau-Bonito holds in its origin an idea of ​​nomadism, in-transit, of a house that does not impose itself as a monument, but as signaling of presence, shelter and ritual. This work began in response to a specific space and to a situation experienced and contemplated in another moment, and then I thought about how to adapt this same drawing to the space of Sesc Pompeia and to a different situation. For Videobrasil, Pau-Bonito fits between the floor and the shears of the warehouse, between its shoring function through the installation procedure, and ornamental, through its visual filling.

Jornais opens the possibility for painting to become a practice in my artistic research. The action of transforming something with a simple gesture and changing the meanings, revealing other bodies in the matter, is an important aspect of this work.

Cristiano Lenhardt in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2017)