Daniel Barreto

Artigos para presente

Projeto Vênus Gallery – São Paulo, 2024

Projeto Vênus is pleased to announce the opening of Artigos para Presente, the first solo exhibition in São Paulo by the painter from Rio de Janeiro.

ph: Ana Pigosso

In this exhibition, Daniel Barreto synthesizes the latest elements introduced into his painting. After a two- month residency in São Luiz do Maranhão, he introduced the equatorial light that vibrates across the entire surface of his canvases. They are true explosions of color and an accentuated, almost celebratory tropical look. It was also during this residency that still-life themes were introduced to his canvases, but they are anthropomorphic vases, flowers and fruit inspired by his memories of the objects and foods that also had a decorative function in his childhood home.

The decorative here is also a place of strangeness. We could boldly say that it is a "tropical unheimlich", the place of the strange that Freud described. The gaze of an attentive and contemplative spectator will find figures that are almost transformed into fruit men, who disguised behind all the color reveal themselves to be figures carrying out an action of an unknown nature, which could be either a carnival parade, a costume, that famous and alleged Brazilian joy, or possibly sinister figures that are hidden from view. In the tangle of colors and the "over all" of almost unstable paint throughout the canvas, the artist creates an image about the indeterminate, and in a sophisticated way he establishes the paradox of the self-taught, peripheral painter, immersed in a space that is about colorism, the tropical, the beautiful, but also about the urbanity of our cities divided by violence and prejudice. At the heart of it all, Daniel Barreto invites the viewer to his canvases first of all to see and try to form in their own mind the question: What is this image?

The introduction of wood as a constructive element in the painting brings back memories of his father, a carpenter, as well as being an element of rupture and synthesis of the image. When he cuts the wood, Barreto performs the original act of his creation, which is drawing. With ingenuity, he draws the cut-out and then, through overlapping, re-imagines the image using paint. An action that begins in his handiwork, but which makes up the final canvas as if it was a computer screen in a kind of manufactured digital art that refers to his situation as an artist in a peripheral country.

Raised in Rio's street culture, with experience both in graphic design and textiles, his work flirts with the Matissian matrix of colors and shapes. In his first solo exhibition in São Paulo, Daniel Barreto powerfully converges all his experiences into a painting that can be as thought-provoking as the revolutionary act of contemplation in the current world.