_Violent Frames_

Situated on the third floor of an emblematic modernist building, only a few steps away from the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, the gallery hosts the works of Jota Castro, Moris, Darío Escobar and Patrick Hamilton. The space is characterized by rather resembling a laboratory of work, experimentation and high-quality exhibition than a traditional gallery.

“Violent Frames” is the name chosen by these four artists, who share a series of crucial vectors in contemporary art. A direct and critical approach to current society, challenging its materiality, its context and its discourse. The title suggests not only the usual relationship with the painting’s format, but rather a link with the vicissitudes of the body beaten in the combat rings, a sort of Fight Club of art, where each author functions as one side of the ring.

In an evident conceptual tuning, the show feeds on the crudest and most violent aspects of the cities in this particular continent: security, fear and surveillance in Four Copper Diamonds, by Patrick Hamilton, where the private turns into a terrain of threat; the media, death and censorship in Moris’ collages (currently at the Sao Paulo Biennial); catastrophes, wastes and accidents in Crash, by Darío Escobar and lastly, icons of the very complex popular leadership in Motherfuckers Never Die, by Jota Castro. The four feed on operations of appropriation, deviation and twisting of objects and signs which are highly referential for mass culture and politics.

The four bet on becoming “the usual suspects”, in a perfect analogy of Bryan Singer’s well known film. Each one plays his cards hoping to become a sort of “Verbal” Kint, infiltrated in the conservative world of art, eager to disseminate the harmful rumors of a Kayser Söze, who is more an idea than a defined character. And that idea, with the humor, the irony and the cynicism of the four, is synthesized in the phrase with which Jota Castro spread the germ of his “new activism”: “I chose art because I didn’t tolerate to lie”.