FEDERICO HERRERO IN MAC NITERÓI
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) convened, together with the curators Pablo León de la Barra and Raphael Fonseca, the Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero (San José, Costa Rica, 1978) to make an exhibition in relation to the specificity and ephemeral link in space. Tempo Aberto (Open Time) –in exhibition until December 8- blurs the limits of the exhibition, where it begins and where it ends, from both its spatial and temporal characteristics.
Herrero's paintings address the issues from small canvases to monumental urban spaces, conceived as landscapes without closure and in constant expansion and transformation. The artwork of the Costa Rican artist exceeds the limitations of the canvas and the traditional exhibition space. Herrero turns to the horizontal planes of the floor and the ceiling, and lives through color and abstraction to urban and public spaces, where color materializes in sound.
To develop Tempo Aberto, Herrero considered the physical aspects of color, such as weight, and symbolic aspects, such as the types of energies that can express, connote or absorb.
Conceived as a great site-specific project, the exhibition emerges from the center of the emblematic MAC Niterói building. Herrero manipulates the walls and fragments them, in some cases, and condemns them, in others. However, as suspended in a network of interdependent nodes, the pieces appear to correspond to a larger system. "The exhibition at MAC Niterói resides in the painting and in the temporal relations that occur between the building and the landscape where its located," explains Herrero, and adds: "An exercise to move from the site specific to the time specific aspect of the painting. " Thus, Tempo Aberto assumes meaning from the formal and narrative poetics that extends beyond the museum, within the landscape and the museum simultaneously.
Federico Herrero interprets some of the properties of the painting - color, tone, brightness, lightness, transparency, fluidity - translate, in a sociological plane, as the relationship of people and societies. "Like colors, we are constantly affected by our surrounding, whatever is next to us in space can trigger huge differences in our personalities," says the artist.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Federico Herrero was born in 1978 in San José, Costa Rica, where he still lives and works. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute, New York, from 1997 to 1998. In 2001 he won the special prize for a young artist at the 49th Venice Biennale. Herrero also participated in the exhibition Fare Mundi / New Worlds in the Latin American Pavilion, part of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Tempo Aberto (Open Time), by Federico Herrero, in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói. Curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Raphael Fonseca.
From September 1st to December 8, from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
General ticket R$ 10.
Students, teachers and over 60 years R$ 5.
Wednesday, free admission.
