Paulo CLIMACHAUSKA (1962) - BRASIL

Cathedral - Ink & acrylic paint on canvas - L 280 x H 200 cm – 2012 - Gallery certificate will be given to the buyer. From Brazilian constructivism, Climachauska perfected traditional tactics and techniques in contemporary works, creating a new face for an old game. Resubtractions is a fundamental piece of the artist’s work, covering four series of works that deal with numerical systems in a subtle, veiled way. The subtraction paintings that became symbolic during the artist’s career, in which Climachauska reconstructed modern buildings as if he makes a stitch, take other forms: they are cubes, sticks, letters and hours that are subtracted one by one, discreetly, not only by the artist’s hands, but mainly by the plays in the public’s mind. Whether bluffing, building models to set up cathedrals or making time stand still, his recent works appeal to the public’s imagination to continue the game. The artist’s creativity tests the audience’s fantasy each round, rescuing the child and questioning the adult in the viewer. The Cathedral series, presented in Fluxo de Caixa, an ambiguously-titled show at Artur Fidalgo gallery, is made up of four large, malevolently white canvases with images of industrial warehouses storing commodities. The minimum geometric element is the cube, modulated to create, with black lines that meet at right angles, an image that seems to have been made by a computer. When you get closer, you realise that these warehouses, despite adopting the illusion of perspective and having an almost natural size, are actually small numbers, written by hand. The industrial warehouse is the gestalt of this set of numbers. The numbers are not exactly the background, but the infrastructure of the figure - like the commodity-dominated society that shapes the contemporary world into a commodity