Projektion
2007.jpg)
Projektion (2011), video still
The relationship between modern and contemporary architecture guides other works of Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, such as Modern Times (2012). "The constant contamination of form in time and space" is present in this collage, explains the artist.
"In Projektion, an abstract film by Hans Ritcher, Rhythm. 23, is projected onto one of Brazil’s first modernist houses, built on Itápolis Street by Gregori Warchavchik.
Hans Richter (1888-1976) was a German painter, graphic artist, vanguardist, researcher and producer who lived in Berlin and experimented with abstract cinema at the same time as Warchavchik built the first-ever modernist houses in Brazil.
None of them had any direct connection to the Bauhaus, even though Warchavchik did study with Walter Gropius and Hans Richter worked with assistants who had frequented the school.
In 2010, I moved next to the house built by Warchavchik in the 1920s, inaugurated in 1930 with a modernist art show. Eighty years later, there I was, in the house inhabited by Warchavchik’s grandson and his wife, the daughter of a prominent Brazilian fashion editor. A house built as a symbol of universal functionality becomes an icon of prestige and good taste.
Gregori Warchavchik (1896-1972) is a key figure in understanding the relationship between art and architecture, European avant-garde art and Latin American modernism.
His house intrigues me for its simplicity and beauty, but also for its historical relevance and iconographic value. It represents the first effort in bringing the International Style to Brazil."
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)
Projektion (2011) | Rodrigo Garcia Dutra
Video installation | Back projection, 3’22”, no sound, B&W, 4 : 3, loop
Projektion (2011)
Rhythm 23 (1923) | Hans Richter
Testimony Rodrigo Garcia Dutra | 18th Festival
A voyeur of modernist utopia. the artist defines himself. In the statement addresses what potential connections there may be with the ideals of this cultural, somewhat heroic past that bears the beauty of a lost nostalgia
Orfeu Negro (1959) | Marcel Camus
Produced one year before Projektion, the video Capanema Carnaval (Deformações no Universo Plano III) (2010) points out more elements to understand the relationship between architecture and the work of Rodrigo Garcia Dutra. On this, the artist says: "I appropriate an excerpt from the film Orfeu Negro, inspired by the play Orfeu da Conceição, written by Vinicius de Morais, which in turn was inspired by the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The take begins with the façade of the Capanema building, one of Brazil’s first modernist buildings, comprising a grid of concrete, steel and glass (the standard materials of the international architectural style). The sequence moves on to the grid of the urban fabric where carnival takes place, subverting that order."