Universes in Universe - Worlds of Art

50th Venice Biennale
15 June - 2 November 2003

Venice / 2003 / Report / Pavilions / Brazil

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Rosângela Rennó

 

Rosângela Rennó

 

Rosângela Rennó

 
 

Série Vermelha (Militares), 2001 - 2003
Red Series (Military)

Rosângela Rennó wrote about this series:

The starting point of Red Series (Military) is the "portrait bourgeois". The original portraits that make up the Red Series were obtained from a collection of family albums from different countries (Brazil, U.S., Germany, France, Russia, Argentina, and others), donated by friends, bought in flea markets and second hand shops, and found on the streets. All are domestic photographs showing individual men and children wearing military (or military-inspired) uniforms.

The images were retouched in the computer to achieve a certain "zero degree" of visibility, as though immersed into the saturation of the applied blood-red color. The blood-like color used annuls the whites and "delays/pushes the image to the limit of visibility. "According to Mariano Navarro, in Red Series there is an effect of "evaporation of the image, by the action of thinning it out until it becomes almost transparent. Then, only the spectator's susceptibility (the action of receiving/absorbing something in himself or the aptitude for experiencing a certain effect) will endow a personal content to something that comes to us from the shadows and lights of the past."

In a way, there is a common opaque background in all of the images, where the different thin images are amalgamated. Effects of a phantasmagoria where the universal male vanity, associated with the use of the uniform, enters in tune with violence in a latent form.


Written for the presentation of a work from this series as a large-format silk-screen print in the "Denkzeichen 4. November 1989" (May - August 2001), an illuminated billboard project by Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt on Alexanderplatz in Berlin..

© Text: Rosângela Rennó

 

Rosângela Rennó
* 1962 Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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