Threads of Tomorrow
Textile museum
New Orleans • March/2024
Curated by: Rodrigo Frazão
Virtual collective exhibition
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daily house
São Paulo - SP • September/2022
Curator: Heloisa Strobel
Far away. Perhaps this is the word that best fits today. How present are you or do you feel right now? In this cosmopolitan universe, where horns are the musical notes that accompany the passing of the hours and points of light are the screens that take over our gaze, making the 'emptiness' the 'filled' of the soul. The desire here is for the soul to fill the void. To see, to feel, to hear. Human senses that make us fill our soul with LIFE, this is the appeal of Raphael Dias and FLO Atelier Botânico, with the exhibition CLOSE.
Pulsing tropicality is how they bring humans (re)closer to nature. Through tufting techniques, Raphael makes us navigate through colors, textures, shapes and a lot of time. Paper cutouts and collages are his studies that make his soul cross his love for the waters of the beaches, the calm of the touch of feet on the rocks and the beauty of the dawn of the days through the wool and its thousands of stitches, in the cozy tapestries present on every surface. And, through the creation of arrangements, curation and a lot of design, FLO Atelier Botânico makes us enter the tropical garden with soul and body, rescuing the beauty and richness of Brazilian plants.
Together, they make the birds and the breeze of the winds become musical notes, the sunlight the warmth we feel on our skin and the shadow we see on the ground when it hits the different curves and textures near the window. It is possible to be present and feel love for life. CLOSE is a perfect starting point.
Karen Suehiro- curator
daily house
São Paulo - SP • September/2022
Curator: Heloisa Strobel
A 14-story building that carries with it the landmark of the greatest icon of the national modernist movement and inhabits the center of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the Gustavo Capanema Palace, in honor of its founder, or Ministry of Education and Health, an allusion to the function for which it was designed, during the second term of Getulio Vargas, in times when the two ministries were still a single portfolio.
The building, under renovation since 2014 and closed to visitors, was elected as the world's most advanced building under construction in the early 1940s by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is the first to use the assumptions of modernist architecture on a monumental scale. Avant-garde since its conception, it was designed in 1936 by a team of young Brazilian modernists: Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, Jorge Moreira, Carlos Leão and Ernâni Vasconcelos - under the coordination of the former and with the guidance of Le Corbusier.
A jewel of Brazilian architecture and history, it features landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx and carries more than 50 works of art and furniture by leading Brazilian artists. Works by Cândido Portinari - valued as one of its main collections - paintings and sculptures by Bruno Giorgi, Adriana Janacópulus, Celso Antônio and Jacques Lipchitz, among others. Dream of a modern and modernist minister - Capanema was known for imbuing education with an artistic and cultural bias and seeking an ideal of art and national civility - materialized the utopia of a modern country, which promised to break with the colonialist past.
At the height of the cultural decay that crossed the country, it was quoted in 2021 as one of the properties to be auctioned at the “real estate fair” of the Union, led by the Ministry of Economy of the current government. Such heresy motivated the mobilization of several intellectuals and national political forces, resulting in the withdrawal of the decision and the return of the building to its previous function. It should be reopened in 2022, housing different bodies and functions, such as Funarte, Ancine, Ibram and Iphan.
With a photographic look, pure and refined, Raphael Dias' aesthetics covers several readings of nature. A visual artist of many facets, he begins this trajectory in photography, passes through drawing and collage - and ends up in tapestry - a platform where the artist presents his visual strength with depth of textures and historical research.
The artist's trajectory is interconnected by composition in general - always rearranging information in an aesthetic way with function - like the Casa Diária store and the spaces that permeate his daily life, such as the artist's own atelier and his home. A look at living, dwelling, architecture and the history of built spaces.
In Moderno Tropical, this look dives into a deep research on the iconic Capanema Building - former Ministry of Education - historic modernist landmark and which carries with it other sources of Brazilian representation such as the dozens of works of art - from painting to tapestry - in its interior .
From the rescue of these images - all of them deprived of the public eye, since the building has been closed since 2014 - Raphael runs his eyes through each environment and each sign of the project, celebrating its forms in new compositions - represented in his works . Each tapestry is an architecture of planes and reliefs that meet in pure and organic forms. The collage process that precedes each composition can be seen in the borders constructed with woolen dots, but which often look like torn paper.
It is this composition of planes, which are presented in blocks of vivid and harmonic colors, which will lead us on a tour of the Capanema Building. Closed, condemned to the whims of the public power, it gains escape under this textured look of the artist in the tapestry, leading us to question who owns the right to own what built our country.
Heloisa Strobel - curator
In August 2021 I read the news about the Capanema Palace being featured in a list among the possible properties to be sold by the federal government, during the term of Jair Bolsonaro. I reflected on everything that this building and the works inside it represent for our culture.I didn't have the pleasure of visiting it before it closed for renovations, I just visited its surroundings, in the silence of a sunny Sunday morning. I contemplated the impeccable modernist architecture from afar and, through the holes in the siding that surrounds the building, I saw the fresco by Portinari, I immersed myself in the mixture of blue tones. I also saw fragments of Burle Marx's gardens in intense green.Through the research for this exhibition, I imagined a visit to the palace, in 1945, when an entire idealization of the future and the utopia of a modern Brazil was inaugurated and materialized. And now, a year after reading the news, I present tapestries that represent not only an imaginary visit to the palace, but also to my inner universe. A sunny visit, like that Sunday morning.In pursuit of the sun, given the current socio-economic turbulence and the cloudy days of life, the works woven here are a tribute to this iconic building of Brazilian modernism, to all the people who were part of its conception and to the Brazilian people. Our cultural history is not for sale and will not be silenced.
Raphael Dias, 2022.