Theo Craveiro

His new video piece, along with a few others in his first solo show at Mendes Wood gallery, is about trailing the unknown, exposing a plastic matrix, the mechanics of tested aesthetic paths, to the whims of fate.

When he trapped an ant colony inside the geometric patterns of works by Hélio Oiticica or Waldemar Cordeiro, he imbued with organic charge a rather cerebral, clear-cut visual strategy, as if to show nothing escapes life and its imprecise conditions. His mirror with lights that switch on and become clear glass, revealing an array of decaying oranges, is another reminder of the ephemeral nature of beauty, the fragility of the present and the ruthlessness of time.

Now Craveiro engages with mundane aspects of life and performs aimless stunts in the pursuit of new boundaries, untrodden shores. His swimming towards the city is filmed by a wooden contraption he devised, a wide fork that trails the water with a camera mounted on top. This he pulls with the traction of his muscles, disappearing into the water and surfacing now and then in a route unclear.

A marijuana plant grows inside a display open on all sides, a black frame, inside the gallery, challenging boundaries between legal and illegal, a living organism subject to the mores and conventions of society. Yet it breathes and grows, in astonishing green. He also built a glass box with a water pump inside, an artificial geyser that sends a gush of water full speed against the sides of the transparent cube at determined intervals.

Craveiro here is stretching the skin of art. Instead of making pieces to illustrate a condition, to respond to the outside world, he applies the vocabulary of artistic endeavors to that very world, life trapped in a box, growing within frames and lost at sea.