Solo-Project

10ª SP-Arte, 2014

(introductory note: SP-Arte is the largest Latin American’s art fair. In its 10ª edition, the organisers created the “Solo-Project”, with the aim to highlighting nine artists and their galleries, from Brazil and abroad. SP-Arte invited Rodrigo Moura to curate this project and Arnaldo Dias Baptista was one of the nine artists invited to be part of the Solo-Project)

Arnaldo Dias Baptista’s work is a hidden treasure that deserves to be seen, known and interpreted. His visual language, expressed in drawings, paintings and collages, is a continuum of Arnaldo’s musical research and are often proposals for instruments, songs and sounds. The guiding thread between the two arts can be found in verbal language, which the artist dominates with his tireless interest in puns, word games, corruptions and alliterations, which alternate between images and sounds, in a hypnotising synesthetic dialogue. In the works we selected for SP-Arte, an extensive series of drawings with titles spelled next to the image (2000) are species of psychedelic calligrams, where deciphering the images along with the text is something intriguing to the reader.

In other drawings, from the 1990s, imaginary creatures occupy the surface of the paper as if to animate it, with organic, ectoplasmic and sometimes eschatological shapes. In the paintings included in this presentation, specially selected for SP-Arte, there is also the relationship between image and text, often referring to song titles or proposing slogan poems or even referring to Mutantes, the band that musically launched Arnaldo in 1960s and when the artist first vented his inventive genius marked by experimentation.

To know Arnaldo’s visual production, presented with some breath in this small exhibition, is to take a step forward in the fascinating mind of an artist who is always prepared to put at risk our excessive confidence in logic, inviting us to enjoy his worldview, poetic and singular.

Rodrigo Moura (curator)