untitled | Rafael Carneiro
2009
Sem título (2009)
"I attended Fine Arts School, and my research into painting started during the course. Throughout college, I obtained the tools not only for my practice, but also to elaborate a critical perception of the problems involved in art production and its insertion into culture.
I believe that, whenever I produce a painting, I am at once producing an object and an image. These pieces are situated within this effort at grasping how an image that takes a different language as reference can come into existence in painting, either in a different way or not.
These are paintings originated by frames from institutional cameras in research laboratories. Here, I am interested in the ambiguous nature of the images, for it seems to me that by turning the images into new ones, through painting, this ambiguous nature is amplified.
With these works, I sought to create a painting that was partly a map.
I would also like to paint maps."
Rafael Carneiro in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)
untitled (2009) | Rafael Carneiro
Painting | Oil on canvas, 200 × 140 cm
untitled (2010) | Rafael Carneiro
Painting | Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm
untitled (2009) and untitled (2010) details and setup at the exhibition space of the 18th Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil
Among Rafael Carneiro's references are authors like Samuel Beckett and Marcel Proust.
"In literature, they perform a sort of leveling of the text. They complicate the hierarchy of a possible narrative which insinuates itself, and that even includes the physical shape into which a book is organized. They do so by rearranging the literary time, creating holes", explains the artist.