Tucci Russo, Torino, 1983  presents five sculptures by Ivens Machado, originally shown in Turin at Galleria Tucci Russo, for the first time in Brazil. Russo was a celebrated Italian Marchand dedicated to promoting exponents of arte povera, with which Machado’s work shares the fusion of artisanal making and industrial procedures, the rehabilitation of construction materials and the reintroduction of a corporal physiology and libidinal charge into art spaces. After the show at Tucci Russo, Machado was invited to participate in the Nouvelle Biennale de Paris by Italian critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva.

The four freestanding sculptures are like open concrete books on thin metal legs. The “pages” are thick tabs that open into three or four facets. Each facet shows a specific consistency, establishing chromatic and textural contrasts between the raw and pigmented concrete, colored a reddish, earthy tone with oxide. The variable dimensions, treatments and distributions of information on the sculpture lend each of them a specific character, as if they were creatures from the same matrix that acquired their own autonomy.

The only wall sculpture in the exhibition shows Machado’s first use of chicken wire, which became recurrent in his work from then on. The chromatic variety of the floor pieces gives way to an ascetic black and gray palette. Concrete and oxide reappear as the main materials, but the chicken wire from which dangle chunks of cracked concrete gives the work a lightness and mobility that contradict its weight.

Machado’s use of construction materials – steel, concrete, chicken wire, shards of tiles and glass – and the structural-architectural character of his sculptures liken the exhibition to a house suspended between construction and demolition. At the time, the Italian critic Luciana Rogozinski described the works as “flowers of ruin”, an expression that aptly surmises the always contradictory, frequently violent coexistence, in Machado, of formal fluency and brute materials, the rubble from which his practice springs.