A Galeria Nara Roesler | Rio de Janeiro presents Sendo dado, solo show by Marcos Chaves. The artist photographically appropriates his large installation from MAC-Niterói (2017) in three different narratives using each of the letters in the sentence Eu só vendo a vista.
In one of the gallery’s rooms, the letters are shown randomly in large format photos over black walls. In another space, the show’s eponymous piece sees the Rio-based artist pay tribute to Marcel Duchamp, the best-known appropriator in art history, as Pablo León de La Barra and Raphael Fonseca, authors of the text, point out. In a composition of smaller photos, containing the same letters as his installation, Chaves writes Étant donnés (Sendo dado, or ‘given that’), the title of the French artist’s emblematic work, in which a naked woman’s body can only be seen through two holes on a wooden door.
“This is, therefore, a proposed meeting of Chaves’ installation and one of the most acclaimed visual art pieces of the 20th century, Étant donnés, presented to the public in 1969,” argue Léon de la Barra and Fonseca.
Capping off his experimentations with a third previously unseen piece, Chaves relies on a stereoscope and a circular slide disc – analog technologies contemporaneous with Étant donnés – to invite viewers to actively engage their bodies in order to read each of the letters in “Só vendo” (either ‘I only sell’ or ‘Only by seeing’). “Only by seeing (and reading) can one believe the power of images and words,” note Pablo León de La Barra and Raphael Fonseca.
