Galeria Nara Roesler | Rio de Janeiro presents Handmade, an exhibition by Vik Muniz, whose first version was presented in its space in São Paulo in 2016. The Handmade series arrives in Rio with unpublished works in which Vik renews paths and procedures present in its production, when investigating the tenuous frontier between reality and representation, between the original object and its copy. Without narrative recourse, works explicitly reveal the work process, while playing with the certainties of the viewer.
According to the artist, what you expect to be a photo is not, and what you expect to be an object is a photographic image. "In an age when everything is reproducible, the difference between the work and the image of the work almost does not exist," he says. In her text about the series, Luisa Duarte points out the difficulty of distinguishing where the copy ends and where the artist's manual intervention begins. "It is in this limbo of the certainties that the artist wishes to insert us." And concludes: "Handmade traces the artist's constant concern to transcend the symbolic dimensions of the image."
Besides the paradoxical relation between image and object and the recurrent use of illusionist strategies - "Illusion is a fundamental requirement of all kinds of language", he says - these works flirt with conceptual art and establish an intense dialogue with abstract art, kinetic and concrete. Above all, according to Vik, for the common interest in Gestalt theories, more specifically in the fields of psychology and science.
