Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents libera abstrahere, an exhibition by Rodrigo Cass at Galpão in São Paulo. This is the artist’s first solo show since 2018, gathering a new body of work. Curated by Ana Paula Cohen, the show takes off from Manifest Material (2021), a series of 12 paintings and a manifesto text by the artist, part of the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France) permanent collection.

The exhibition gathers 12 video-sculptures and 12 gouaches, broadening the artist’s central inquiry into the relationship between the moving image, the object and architecture. The video-sculptures contain vignettes with synthetic actions that take the artist’s body parts as catalysts for these interrelations. Images are projected onto three-dimensional polygons wrapped in colored linen. The execution of repetitive tasks alternates between registers of a quotidian nature and a contemplative-spiritual ethos. In Liberta a pele do espaço (2023), the large blue surface seems to be a rock wall, whose texture is given as much by the linen’s weave as by the sandy image. A simple touch of the artist’s hand sets off a cascade of powdered pigment, enlivening the dormant space and revealing the material’s sedimentary constitution, submitted to the shaping force of gravity. Before a two-tone background in ochre and terracotta, Revolução Permanente (2023) shows the artist scrubbing two bricks together over his feet until they’re buried under the falling dust. In a subsequent inversion, the feet appear upside down, holding up a mound of dirt, tenuously balanced on the soles. The video stages the perpetual transformation of matter in an interplay of accumulation and erosion. The gouaches, in turn, take off from fractures, dislocations and expansions of the surface. These abstract-geometric compositions project virtual volumes in space, as paint is interspersed with precise concrete lines, a fundamental piece in the artist’s visual repertoire.

The first monograph dedicated to the artist’s work was launched in the exhibition context. Organized by Ana Paula Cohen and edited by Cobogó, the book features an introduction by the artist himself, as well as essays by Frédéric Paul, curator of the contemporary art department at the Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou, and by Ana Paula Cohen.