Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present the exhibition After the Rain, by Janaina Tschäpe. Consolidating her personal vocabulary with each new work, Tschäpe makes use of photography, video, drawing, and sculpture to create narratives with tremendous dramatic intensity. Cinema, literature, and painting are constant sources of inspiration for her.
In her previous work, Sala de Espera (“Waiting Room”), displayed last year in the Paço das Artes in São Paulo, Tschäpe took photographs in which her own body was the protagonist of a process of mutuation into an angel, a devil, or a bird. Tschäpe used artificial limbs to create a body in transformation, constructing a kind of “personal mythology.” In this new exhibition, the themes of metamorphosis and hybridism continue to permeate her work. This time Tschäpe has photographed other women, who incorporate new, mutant creatures in latex skins.
Specially developed costumes create deformations in the body: arms and legs extend to great lengths, new organs appear inflated and interconnected by colored tubes. Tschäpe creates bodies full of folds and points of re-entry that seem to confound interior and exterior. Skin is disguised as viscera and vice-versa. These creatures appear in dramatic natural scenarios that explore a pictorial palette of intense black, brown, green, and blue.
In her drawings, Tschäpe uses lighter colors that contrast with the dense colors in her photography. The contrast becomes complete in the theme—here the artist is creating a microscopic world, full of little particules that come together and repel each other, as in a laboratory slide. In the drawinngs’ intimate scale, Tschäpe presents an abstract universe, equally full of folds and re-entry points, that indicate a healthy complexity in this artist’s work.
This is Janaina Tschäpe’s third solo exhibition in São Paulo. She has already had solo shows in the Reina Sofia National Museum, in Spain, and in the Frac Champagnes-Ardennes Museum, in France. Later this year she will have solo shows in the Sketch Gallery, in London, and in the Centre Départemental d’Art Contemporain, in Albi, France.
