Inside is a virtual exhibition composed of dissimilar works, grouped under the common denominator of the inside/interior. The emblematic image of the curatorial selection is a monumental and poetic gesture by Carlito Carvalhosa: It was like this when I got here (2006), an installation in which a cast of Rio de Janeiro's famous Sugarloaf—so often painted by travelling artists during the nineteenth and twentieth century—entered the interior of the museum as a mirrored, inverted and dissected image.
Every image in this virtual exhibition signals an interior, referring to an activity or a state of interiority: a place of shelter with an outward view (Lucia Koch), a bubble that travels along an inside path (Cao Guimaraes and Rivane Neueschwander), a lamp made of music (Cao Guimaraes), a piano concert for no one, which a sphynx cat listens to (Cristina Canale), a shadow play, where the shadow of the artist appears like a landing on the traditional wallpaper of a theater salon (Brigida Baltar), a body protected by a shield, walled behind an architectural fragment (Alexandre Arrechea), an immense gallery without visitors with paintings as dark windows (Daniel Senise), the remnants of a Renaissance view once all its figures have been erased (Fabio Miguez), a house—our home suspended—(Raul Mourao), the portrait of a militant woman, fighting for housing, in her temporary shelter, surrounded by her plants staring at us intensely (Virginia de Medeiros).
Galeria Nara Roesler's first virtual curatorial selection, Inside (available online on the gallery's Artsy viewing room and on its website galerianararoesler.art), seeks to maximize its virtual space by assembling works available for sale and others already in private collections, upon the condition that they condense a single concept, a word, a conceptual key, thus reducing curatorship to a minimal selective gesture, to the construction of a sole series: within this simple, linear seriality all works both, embody a different intensity and share a common intensity (in this case: that of the interior); each one transforming through the effect of vicinity, becoming an echo, or resonating with the works that precede or succeed it.
With this, Inside minutely follows the concept of series of transformations: any work, like any mask—as suggested by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss—implies another beside it, real or virtual, that transforms it into something different. The Minima moralia of curation: a space where all works, through vicinity, transform themselves and are read in succession, like a Haiku, as a brief poem, in quarantine.
Click to view the exhibition on Artsy.