Exhibition "A.A. Barrio: Psycho-Alcoholic Drawings

A.A. Barrio: Psycho-Alcoholic Drawings

Opening: 11th June, Saturday, 11am - 3pm | Visitation: 13th June to 8th July 2022

Galeria Millan brings to the public a new series of drawings by Artur Barrio in the exhibition A. A. Barrio: Psycho-Alcoholic Drawings. Produced throughout 2016, the works cause perplexity and attack the viewer's comfortableness in front of the scene, states Paulo Venancio Filho, critic and curator of the show.

Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with scenographic elements that allude to the non-conformism present in the drawings on display. "Barrio manipulates elements that disquiet well-being. Unabashed invectives hurled against a falsely domesticated world, shameless and authentic, without making concessions, open. Romantic? Perhaps. Revoltingly romantic, then, in defiance of the appeasing good tone. Not to mention the humour that is mixed with the lack of decorum - an insolent combination", reflects the curator.

In the exhibition, the artist signs with his heteronym A. A. Barrio and explains that "since 1966, the drawings, paintings and some objects have been signed this way". He tells that in 1969 Barrio appeared, which later became Artur Barrio in Trabalhos, Situações, Cadernos, Livros: "A.A. Barrio, with the sale of his drawings, financed Barrio's works, later Artur Barrio in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Nothing could be more fitting than to pay homage to him with this exhibition at Galeria Millan," explains the artist.

Born in Portugal and settled in Brazil since 1955, Barrio has lived between the two countries since 1974. He is an advocate of ephemeral and protestatory art. He joined the Brazilian art scene in the 1960s, in the midst of the frenzy surrounding experimental art that marked the production of the period, and already at that time, he established a new paradigm by directing his transgressive practice towards a radical break from monolithic work dissociated from life.

The artist is interested in reflecting and provoking on the normative way of living and the causal nexuses through works that fall within the field of "poetic terrorism". The use of organic materials such as toilet paper, human waste, blood and bones are common in his works, elements that show his intent to throw art to the end point of its destiny: the street, the sewer and the trash.

The drawings presented now, in A. A. Barrio: Desenhos Psico-Alcoólicos make up a kind of diary, or album, full of the artist's notes. Made with ink and coloured pencil on paper of equal dimensions, it is as if the series froze moments of a stream of consciousness that encompasses eroticism, brutality and revolt against the world.

They are, according to Venancio, reactions to the monotony of everyday life. "They do not intend, have no pretensions beyond being what they are: a private, acidic, corrosive, amusing, and popular anecdote, of immediate communication - averse to contemporary artistic languages," says the curator.

Throughout the exhibition period, Galeria Millan will launch a publication containing a compilation of the drawings and a text signed by Paulo Venancio Filho.