Exhibition "Indiscreet Windows, I see what you see?"

"Indiscreet Windows, do I see what you see?"

Marilou Winograd's photo exhibition opens at the Centro Cultural Correios RJ

Curiosity, indiscretion or search for communication? Object of a research carried out over 18 months, "Indiscreet Windows, I see what you see?", individual exhibition by Marilou Winograd, began in the isolation resulting from the pandemic. Recollected, with a reduced visual universe, the geometry of the windows and the new dancing geometry that was established at dusk, with small points of light flickering in the darkness, sharpened the artist's eye. Curated by Alexandre Murucci, the photographic occupation is produced by Carlos Bertão and Alê Teixeira and will open on June 11, Saturday, at the Centro Cultural Correios RJ.

"In a deserted Copacabana, silent and sad, the call of the emergence of each lit lighthouse warmed my solitude searching for some pulsating life, in the suggested shadows and silhouettes. I started to photograph every night at different times these illuminated, isolated spaces, small universes of heat and energy. How many stories and lives in suspension, together, but separated...", recalls Marilou Winograd.

Armchair, small table and two high stools, one in each window, will be part of the Proa round room. A total of 20 large prints, measuring 100cm x 150cm, will be used, as well as around 150 smaller ones (30cm x 40cm), which will be superimposed. There will be a performative action on the day of the vernissage.

"In her chronicle of a difficult time, Marilou starts from photographs of Hoopernian ambience, where absences become characters, until she arrives at diffuse, experimental images, comfortably situated in the Brazilian photographic tradition, by artists such as José Oiticica Filho and Geraldo de Barros. Almost abstract, they are not only his pictorial approach, but also his existential testimony, a power that reverberates intensely in his non-discreet window. A window that cried out for life, while life remained suspended, transmuting itself into art through her gaze. A look that asks us, humanly speaking, 'Do I see what you see?'", analyses curator Alexandre Murucci.

"Indiscreet Windows, I see what you see?", by Alexandre Murucci

Marilou Winograd's work has always been guided by atmospheres and memories. Even when the subjectivity of her formal composition imposes itself, there is a clear "psychologism" about our reception of the reality she proposes. Working with photographs and the expansion of her prints into objects and installations in a large part of the body of her production, the artist maintains a rigorous plastic vocabulary that is at once soft and vigorous. In the show she now presents, Marilou brings us a visual compendium that maps out feelings common to most people in this unusual period of what life was like during the great pandemic of the contemporary era - the suspension of our possibilities of social interaction and all the anguish this caused - globally. In this work, the artist establishes, from her own emotional survival, a relational geography with her domestic sphere - that which her space allowed her to apprehend from the outside world, through her window and her gaze as an option for remaining communication, at a time when we are imprisoned in our circumstances. In the imposed physical exclusion, it was not enough for the artist the tools that the brave new world provides us with. Her will to be with the other expanded through the search for gestures, experiences, possible nods, seen from the window of her flat, hovering over a desert Copacabana, her only channel of resilience. Of breathing!

In a classic of universal cinematography, "Indiscreet Window", from the middle of the 20th century, the main character, played by Jimmy Stewart, followed the solitary observation, trapped in the incommunicability of his life, reflecting the anxiety and disconnection of our times, which was already being structured on the horizon, with the diffusion of TV and which today, empowered by digital life, has become the standard of our relationships. That which the sociologist David Riesman appropriately called "the lonely crowd", because already in his 1950 book, he deferred that contemporary society had been atomised and increasingly would be characterised by people living among themselves, but apart from each other. However, unlike the cold observation of the film's police-like plot, the artist's gaze is empathetic, sympathetic? It was, through the poetic register, her way of maintaining her place in the world. And in what her sensitivity transformed into urgency of expression, she offers us a documentary approach to this joint human experience, which will still be visited many times, in the light of history. In this primordial path, of search for the life that overflowed through chinks, lights, shadows, rooms, balconies and silences, Marilou develops a plastic treaty, interacting in our perception, until the images, a priori attached to reality framed by sensitive geometries, are diluted when exploding in movements of colours and shapes of an expressionist repertoire. Fauvist, we might say. This, which would otherwise present itself as a development of authoriality about the work, is even more touching, as he confides that his current perception of the world is undergoing a process of sensory accommodation, after some ophthalmic-surgical interventions he underwent. By bringing us, in some images, what is sometimes her limit of visual apprehension of the world, she gives us the opportunity for a wider example of empathy, providing us with the place of the other - the alterity of the "Em-si (en-soi)"/"Para-si (pour-soi)", as Sartre put it, in counterpoint to the descartean limits of the solitary existence of man. 

More about Marilou Winograd

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Marilou Winograd arrived in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1960. Graduated in Arts at CEAC (Contemporary Art Center), IBA (Institute of Fine Arts) and EAV (School of Visual Arts) of Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions, conferences and seminars in Brazil and abroad (1971/2022). She is one of the curators of the project Zona Oculta - entre o público e o privado, with 350 women artists (2004/2014), of the project Acesso Arte Contemporânea, with 179 visual artists (2011/2022) and of several group shows, occupations and calls. In 2004, she published the book "The Silence of White", a visual account of her trip to Antarctica, in a counterpoint to her work. Among the countries where he has exhibited, besides Brazil, are: France (Paris), Germany (Berlin and Cologne), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Italy (Rome) and Portugal (Lisbon). 

Service

"Indiscreet Windows, do I see what you see?"

Opening: 11 June, Saturday, from 4pm to 7pm

Visitation: from 14 June to 23 July 2022

Curator: Alexandre Murucci

Production: Carlos Bertão and Alê Teixeira/EntreArte

Cultural Centre Correios RJ

Address: Rua Visconde de Itaboraí, 20 - Centro - RJ - Brazil

Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, from 12h to 19h

Free entry