We can only dance in this skizi that becomes consonant (excerpt)
Pedro França, was born in Rio de Janeiro forty-one years ago. He completed a Master’s degree in History at PUC-Rio (2010) and worked for a few years in jobs that differed little or much from artistic production: at 18 he was already writing about the work of colleagues and at 20 he was a curator, a role that he later came to play in programming. of events for the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010). França also worked as an art critic and professor (also from the age of 20 until the start of the pandemic) of Art History at MAM-SP, the Tomie Ohtake Institute and the Escola de Artes Visuais (EAV) in Parque Lage, where he began study when he won a scholarship. Although he began drawing at the age of 15 as a self-taught artist, it was precisely at EAV where he met Anna Bella Geiger, an artist and teacher who would mark his studies, thoughts and, above all, the conception of singular harmony in his work. Geiger gave classes showing works without rehearsing or encouraging any speech that preceded them. It is the dancing in these differences that become consonant. The same principle proved to be pertinent when the artist joined Ueinzz, a theater company in which he participated for 13 years, designing scenes, building set pieces and understanding that theatrical elements are reincarnated in many details of the production of Plastic and Visual Arts.
In a process of collective, theatrical creation, drawing was the artist’s way of fixing movements, preventing them from evaporating, creating scripts and being fascinated by the ever-elusive gestures. During the pandemic, with the lack of theater, Pedro França turned to scenes supported by imagination and condensed in drawing and painting. The more or less scenic movement, however, is also revealed in his sculptures, although immobile. After all, in them the dirt, the kitchen, the trash, the gesture and nature are presented in a ball. A non-dichotomous dance. In fact, trained musically by funk, França understands and states that “working with a medium means finding the way in which it can receive everything, allowing any reason to enter”. It is “a less neurotic and obsessive way of dealing with things”. In the classes he presented, in the classes he attended, in the videos, scenes, sculptures, a question: “what makes one image want to stand next to another?”, asks the artist. The succession of scenes reveals a succession of hidden, dreamlike and sometimes terrifying desires. We can see that the scenic, imagery and narrative content of the drawings and frescoes meets the sometimes cartographic spatiality of the ceramics used in his sculptures. We are dancing on a stage with tectonic plates, in constant and corporeal movement, without controlled principles. Every now and then an intense shock erupts, almost an explosion: an encounter.
Clay, the material used in the construction of his sculptures, invokes some familiarity. After all, anyone can imagine that they can build something with it. And it is not uncommon for artists to open their processes to collaborations. Approximation and intimacy between different elements and forces is present in his artistic practice as well as in his theoretical practice as a teacher, for example. In the exhibition, this tendency towards encounter and consonance between divergences takes shape through the work Caldo Vivo, for example, an unfolding of an experience in Mexico. (...) Another experience learned in Mexico was the fresco technique - painting done on walls or ceilings that have a fresh layer of mortar so that they can better receive the paint.
