Galeria Fortes Vilaça brings to São Paulo the first solo exhibition of the artist Sara Ramo. Sara has Brazilian and Spanish citizenship, and grew up in both Brazil and Spain. Since 1998 she has lived in Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. Ramo recently emerged as a revelation on the contemporary art circuit, with works in video, photography, and installation. In the words of the curator of the Pampulha Museum, Rodrigo Moura, "A good part of Sara Ramo's work is constituted on the basis of a secret vocation for banal objects and their formal and conceptual possibilities in the field of art."
In Fortes Vilaça, the public encounters a white wall that cuts the exhibition space in two parts, duplicating it. A staircase similar to the gallery's is attached to the wall, in the opposite direction of the existing staircase, in a game of mirroring the space. The spectator who climbs this staircase can see, from above, what the artist calls a map.
Different objects found in the city streets are organized by codes or associations invented by Ramo. They are wrappers from candy, popcorn, and cigarettes, pieces of brick and shards from walls, pieces of wood and broken toys. A map that does not represent a space, but makes evident a complex relation between the artist's gaze and the landscape constructed from fragments, leftovers. A game of memory in which the spectator is invited to participate. The backside of the wall has exposed bricks and cement, a kind of revelation of what is behind things. The artist gives even more emphasis to this idea by positioning a mirror in the back wall, so that the objects can be seen frontally and from behind. In the end, the spectator is faced with philosophical questions about the relation between the real object and its representation, the visible and the invisible, exterior and interior.
Sara Ramo will have exhibitions later this year in the Centro Cultural São Paulo, and in the Paço das Artes in 2006. She has received a grant from the Pampulha Museum, where she recently created O Jardim das Coisas do Sótão (The Garden of Things in the Attic), her first large-scale installation conceived especially for that institution.
