Português
In September Pivô opens Rita Vidal’s new project “Abyss”. The show is a part of Hello.Again program, that commissions new work from emerging artists at Pivô’s entrance.”Abyss” was chosen through an open call amidst 80 proposals by a jury formed by the curators Douglas de Freitas and Sabrina Moura and the artist Lucas Simões.
Using her expertise in fashion design, especially in moulage making, Rita Vidal creates a taylor-made garment for this space. For this purpose, Vidal chose to use industrial felt, a very thick fabric used in house building and construction sites.
The artist have been working with this kind of felt for few years but recently she came across a new color of the matter: a matte and deep black. This recent discovery in such a familiar practice was the origin of the new project. “Abyss” is her first large scale work and also the first time the artist works site-specifically.
Vidal handles the fabric throughout the space, wrapping it’s modern curves, erasing amendments and footholds until finally converting it all into a kind of black hole. The viewer’s encounter with the work is tactile as well as visual. There are no objects on display or any hierarchy between the work and the observer.
Seeing from the street the environment may seem empty or under installation, but once the audience comes inside the encounter with the material alters the perception of the room. The soft texture and the difference in temperature provoked by the large amount of wool makes one aware of it’s presence, and the color of the felt gives the space a kind of solemnity. Despise of the large amount of material used by the artist, the installation is subtle. It is a quiet invitation to experience this very live space through new parameters.
About Rita Vidal
Rita Vidal (b. 1980, Brazil) is based in São Paulo. A graduate in pattern cutting in Fashion Design, she investigates disused sewing and embroidery techniques in order to create poetic narratives on different fabrics. Many hours of painstaking labour are dedicated into her work in order to shape something that mimics what would be the result of a slip or a small accident. Such process is akin to a crime investigation, whereby one devotes the same attention that a detective would, in reconstructing a trail or remains of a crime through a number of different pieces of evidence. The same happens with the industrial felt patterns (a prototyping material) tailored to the conception of unexpected bodies. In 2015 she was part of the group show “Até aqui tudo bem/So far so good,” at White Cube Gallery in São Paulo.
The body of space
Using her expertise in the field of fashion, Rita Vidal creates a sort of tailor-made garment for Pivô’s reception space. The chosen material is industrial felt, which is commonly used in construction to seal and insulate spaces. The artist has worked with this type of felt for a number of years; however, she recently came into contact with a previously unknown colour: a matt, deep black. Discovering a novel colour in something so familiar was one of the drivers in her proposal for Pivô’s programme Hello.Again, where Vidal works for the first time directly with the space, in a large-scale project.
The term site-specific is used to describe artworks that are determined by the context in which they are presented. Vidal takes that into account to approach her environment in its totality. The work is informed not only by the space’s physical features (the curved façade, the proportions of the straight angles and the central column are all pivotal in the work’s form) but also by its geographic location. Working in an exhibition space in the centre of a city of 11 million inhabitants, in which the volume of visual information is proportional to its demographic density, generates, in the artist’s own words, a desire for subtraction: ‘minus a space rather than an additional display’.
What the visual arts lexicon defines as site-specific is more as a procedure than a category. Using a technique known as moulàge, Vidal makes the fabric conform to the building’s modern curves, eliminating corners and points of support, to convert the space into a kind of black hole. The name of this tri-dimensional draping technique comes from the French word moule, which means shape, model. The expression fait au moule means made to measure. Moulàge doesn’t require a flat geometry as it operates directly onto the body, adapting to the singularity of each mannequin.
By transferring this technique to the space, the artist elected the room’s large central column as a support axis for the whole piece, in the same way that the spine is the body’s centre of gravity, which determines the fit of the garment. By carefully joining felt sheets to construct an ‘abysm’ in an environment as accelerated as São Paulo city centre Vidal proposes a pause to breathe. There are no objects displayed in the room and the lack of items subverts the habitual separation between artwork and viewer.
Seen from the street, the environment can seem empty or under installation but by entering it the viewer experiences the material’s soft texture with their feet, feeling the difference in temperature produced by the concentration of wool in the space and, above all, coming into touch with the physical presence of the material intricately folded and stitched by the artist. The dark colour of the felt covering the floor alters the perception of the room’s proportions, conferring it with a sort of solemnity.
Rita Vidal deals with the body of space. The unusual sewing of the floor, steps and curves means that the work only comes to existence when we become aware of our own existence inside it.
