_Electric Blue Night_

Lucas Arruda’s piece operates as a memory of landscape, setting the tone for “Electric Blue Night”, a group show at Mendes Wood gallery, in São Paulo, devoted to a contemporary investigation of space.

While landscape has always been a classic subject in art history, contemporary art has long retired the idea of genres like this. Curator Ricardo Sardenberg’s proposal aims at establishing a fresh perspective geared back at this leitmotif. Camouflaged in the middle of the room, as if it were an animal in a forest, is a stool designed by Rivane Neuenschwander, something designed to be neutral, a knock-off of everyday aesthetics.

Jac Leirner substitutes the sun with one of her most powerful pieces, redone here in smaller format. It is an endless string of wires coiled on the wall, a gigantic demonstration of strife, which ends with a miniscule light bulb emanating a faint, almost absent light.

Another kind of camouflage, as though processed by geometric abstraction, José Bento’s work is a flaccid pillow lying on the floor, except its skin is made of wooden plates articulated in organic fabric. This is landscape as we know it after modernity.