Eduardo Sued - Chromatic boldness" exhibition

Danielian Gallery and Cassia Bomeny Gallery present the exhibition

"Eduardo Sued - Chromatic daring"

The celebrated 96-year-old artist has a double simultaneous exhibition with an important group of unpublished works, produced between 1989 and 2020, chosen from his own studio in Jacarepaguá, Rio de Janeiro. In addition to paintings, three-dimensional experiments made in different supports and materials will be exhibited.

 

Danielian Gallery (Gávea), and Cassia Bomeny Gallery (Ipanema), Rio de Janeiro

11 November 2021 to 21 January 2022

Curator: Vanda Klabin

Free entry

Anti-Covid protocol

 

 

A Danielian Gallery and the Cassia Bomeny Gallery present the exhibition "Eduardo Sued - Chromatic Boldnesswith an important and expressive group of never-before-seen works by the artist Eduardo Sued (1925, Rio de Janeiro), from his studioin Jacarepaguá. Besides paintings paintings, there will be exhibitions of three-dimensional made in different supports and materials, which the artist calls "relief-painting", where there is the junction of the canvas with wood stubs. At 96 years of age, which he completed on 10 June, the celebrated artist continues active, working daily in his studio. The curator Vanda Klabinwho has been following his trajectory since the 1980s, selected the works that will be shown simultaneously in the two galleries and wrote the critical text that accompanies the double exhibition.

 

Vanda Klabin says that the two exhibitions "synthesize Eduardo Sued's trajectory". "They are different moments in his production, where everything is colour. The exhibitions permits a broad view and reflective look at the trajectory of this great artist, a thinker and the greatest colourist of the national art scene. A whirlwind of forms and colours. In his own words: 'Everything is colour, there can be sonatas, symphonies ...'". "Sued always revitalises the pictorial language, with freedom and chromatic intensities. A colour has a polysemic place in his work. His paintings reflect the relationship between light, the chromatic surface, a geometry, space and time. The concern with luminosity is present in all his works", he states.
At Danielian Gallery there are works from the 1980s, a period that Sued developed "an orchestration of black areas, with vibrant coloured bands divided into unequal segments", explains the curator. "These are works of a geometric structure with bolder chromatic oppositions and large-scale works where proportions and colours are altered." She adds that "in the 1990s Sued introduces new elements into his works: he uses aluminium paint and thicker, more discontinuous brushstrokes, as well as returning to collages, present in the works of the 1970s."

At Cassia Bomeny Gallery are concentrated "the vast greys and silvers, which bring a different luminosity, more reduced accents - the morning or evening grey, of diverse nature, by the lower and opaque tones, a subtle contrast with these tones and a chromatic identity of its own with its luminous value".

 

EDUARDO SUED BY VANDA KLABIN

Eduardo Sued's painting occupies a singular position in the history of contemporary Brazilian painting, a singular position in the history of contemporary Brazilian painting, as much for its chromatic refinement as for the extremel. The artist's systematic and intense production, over the course of time, has shaped an autonomous pictorial field marked by the strict discipline of painting and a spirit of permanent research.

 

Eduardo Sued has a continuous and incessant production, as he has kept the same routine for many years: waking up early and going to his atelierHe always says that he was born with this vitality, that work is fundamental, an inner necessity to be always developing, and that he leaves the studio every day exhausted. He works daily in his studio, an architectural project by his friend Luiz Paulo Conde (1934-2015), located in a condominium in Jacarepaguá́, in Rio de Janeiro. He considers it the place of creation, the place where things are generated. He stated that the studio itself has its own world: 'The objects that are within that space and belong to you. For that reason, Miró and Giacometti, too, liked to have their atelier full of works. It is here in this place that the artist decides to do something".

 

I have followed Sued's trajectory for many years, since the early 1980sI have known his studio on Rua Viveiros de Castro, in Copacabana, and the studio on Rua da Alfândega, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, where he made the work for the Venice Biennale, composed of chromatic areas cut out of pure silk fabric, which act on the movement of the work's surface, like a questioning of the limits of painting. This studio in the Centre was the place where his wife, the fashion designer Marilia Valls(1928-2018), created her pieces for her shop Blu-Blu.

 

Eduardo Sued was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1925, the son of Syrian immigrants immigrants from the city of Homs, located northeast of Damascus. He studied at the National School of Engineering in Rio de Janeiro, and abandoned college in the third period to devote himself completely to the plastic arts. Contrary to strict traditional and academic rules, he preferred to attend free courses. He studied painting and drawing with the German painter Henrique Boese, in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, in 1949. In the 1950In the 1950s he worked as a draughtsman in Oscar Niemeyer's office; Sued always mentions that mathematics allowed him to cultivate, from the beginning, clarity of thought and discipline in the precision of making.

 

He then travelled to Paris, there he attended the Académie Julian and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where there was a predominance of the Paris School and the main strands of Cubism - the epicentre of modern painting - were underway. At 1953he returned to Rio de Janeiro, aligned with the Picassian poetics of cubist fragmentation and with the modern plastic values acquired during his European stay. He studied etching with Iberê Camargo in the Lapa studio, a meticulous, almost craftsman-like work; he learnt various techniques that were important for his professional training. He began to produce etchings known as etching, with colours juxtaposed in soft shades, made on granulated metal surfaces.

 

Sued follows his path, without ever affiliating himself to any movement or aesthetic programme, keeping himself independent and distant from the discussions between figurative and abstract and/or the dissensions between concrete artists from São Paulo. In the 1960sIn the 1960s, he also did not submit to the new figurative order that was in force. The constructive ideas found an intense development in the Brazilian art scene after the inauguration of the I International Biennial of São Paulo, in 1951. The art critic and his great friend Ronaldo Britowho has followed his work since the 1960said that "Eduardo Sued is the great disinhibitor of abstract language of constructive origin in modern Brazilian painting".

 

He held his first solo exhibition at the Bonino Gallery, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1958when he presented the fundamental elements of his plastic thought, paintings, gouaches and watercolours, with a chromatic calligraphy and a language of geometric abstraction. He participated in the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984with an unprecedented work, composed of bands of coloured pure silk which replace the elongated vertical strips of colour on the surface of the canvas, as a negation of depth, on the border of the three-dimensional.

 

In the 1980new elements appeared in his work. The base of the canvas breaks the contour of the entire surface and pulverises the space constructed by the shape of the square. A kind of "pictorial plinth", in which the different chromatic zones are divided into unequal segments, which interrupt the continuous extension of the colours. In his words: "the base breaks the outline of the picture, makes it cease to be just a square".

 

In his plastic thought, the act of painting has an intense relationship with music. He works not only with his eyes, but with his ears to listen to the demands of the canvases. Colours are meant to be seen and heard and he mentions that when he is in doubt, he closes his eyes and brings his ear closer to the canvas, thinking about the values of light and dark. The colours blossom little by little: "I listen to what the canvas asks for. I usually listen to the colours so I can make the chromatic structure of the canvases". He uses this correspondence as a metaphor for his pictorial experience, he recommends the artist to work with his ears to listen to the demands of the canvases.

 

The Sued vocabulary is based on geometric structures and daring chromatic oppositionsIn his work, he creates an original plastic totality with great freedom in the treatment of colour, sometimes saturated, with chromatic combinations or dissonances, but always constructing new directions.

 

Sued seeks to harmonise things that do not harmonise; colours that do not come together. The artist seems to be always provoking new situations, as well as musical dissonances, being a listener of the music of Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, the famous second school of Vienna, who worked towards the dissolution of the tonal system, known for the new sound organization, as a consequence of the inevitable disintegration of the tonal system - the dodecaphonismThis is the dodecaphonism, musical writing in which none of the 12 sounds of the chromatic scale has greater importance than the others. Which means breaking with an established system or situation. In the numerous visits I made to the artist's studio, there was always music playing, often dissonant. Sued mentioned that the distance between a chord and another could glimpse the presence of a counterpoint in the painting, in the values of light/dark and luminosities.

 

At 1998when I was director of the Hélio Oiticica Art Centrein Rio de Janeiro, I invited Eduardo Sued to hold a solo exhibition curated by Paulo Sergio Duarte. This show brought together some 40 works, spanning twenty years of work and some recent paintings. The artist presented an installation entitled "Objects", in homage to the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. These are the so-called rulers, three-dimensional objects made of painted wood, usually grouped and leaning or stuck to the wall.

 

The work of Paul Klee was of enormous importance to his work and is considered a seminal point for the development of collages, which came to be present in his work from the 1970s onwards. In 1974, he held an exhibition at the Galeria Luiz Buarque de Hollanda e Paulo Bittencourt, in Rio de Janeiro, with works in which collages were present and large areas of colour, now of full visuality: "No longer a coadjuvant annex to a structural show, but as one of the essential formative parts of the work".

 

Until the 1980the behaviour of the brush did not appear in the structure of the canvases, which presented various shades of colour, with well-ordered but smooth modulations. In 1982, at Eduardo Sued's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Artin Rio de Janeiro, various canvasses with new solutions were presented, now a palette with intense colour vibrations and oblique brushstrokes.

 

In the 1990 his works present other dilemmas, with thick, discontinuous brushstrokes, a new opposition to the planar surface, acquiring greater complexity with the addition of wooden cut-outs and three-dimensional elements, as a questioning of the limits of painting, as opposed to accumulations of matter. Sued calls it relief-painting, where there is the junction of the canvas with wood stubs. He states: "Silver is emptiness, but an emptiness that is the place of something and contains the presence of the invisible. The vitalized void represents things without gravity and without weight, and it was extending like a power on the canvas. It is as if I were dealing with invisible and absent entities".

 

At 2004we held an individual exhibition entitled "Eduardo Sued: the experience of painting", at the Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, curated in partnership with Ronaldo Brito. The exhibition emphasized works, now in large scale formats, in which Sued adds to his painting wood slats painted on the edges, exalting a public condition to his works; there was also a special room, with older works, considered exemplary, being elected the exhibition of the year.

 

SERVICE: "Eduardo Sued - Chromatic Daring"

11 November 2021 to 21 January 2022

Free entry

Danielian Gallery

Rua Major Rubens Vaz, 414, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 22470-070

Telephones: +5521.2522.4796 +5521.98830.3525

Email:contato@danielian.com.br

https://www.danielian.com.br/

Anti-Covid protocol

 

Cassia Bomeny Gallery

Rua Garcia D'Ávila, 196
Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro
22421-010 - RJ

Monday to Friday, from 10am to 7pm
Saturdays from 10am to 3pm(by appointment through Whatsapp +5521.97390.5995)

Phone: 5521.3085.3000

Email:contato@cassiabomeny.com.br

https://cassiabomeny.com.br/

Anti-Covid protocol