Rodrigo Sassi — MdM Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 19 → May 7, 2015

MdM Gallery, in partnership with Nosco Gallery (London) features, from March 19th to May 7th, the first individual exhibition of Rodrigo Sassi in Paris. In “In Between”, a previously unseen series produced during his six-month stay at Cité des Arts, this Brazilian artist continues to put at the heart of his art a confrontation between the spontaneity of urban spaces and the immaculate space of exhibition places.

Right from the first urban interventions of Rodrigo Sassi –like his temporary installations in the dumps of São Paulo, in which Sassi reorganised in a poetic fashion the litter contained–, the street has always represented both the rationale for his work, and its support as well as its raw material. Even if most of his work is now done in studios, it is quite obvious that his three-dimensional art pieces have a previous life of their own. The Brazilian artist composes his installations-sculptures, such as “La fusion du triptyque pour l’intégrité de la cause” designed for the present exhibition, with the same basic instruments as those used to build the skeleton of a city: wooden moulds and concrete, poured in order to erect the pillars and the beams of skyscrapers. But, as is always the case in his thinking and his work, Sassi changes the natural order of things and restores a new meaning to them.

By giving them rounded, curved shapes, Rodrigo Sassi manages to soften a material which is rigid and raw by nature. Hence surprising shapes that can make one think –but without any certainty– of musical notes, of clouds or of flowers. “One can see these sculptures as drawings in space. In so far as I almost never intervene on the neutral colours of materials, there is but one line that goes up and down, following its own rhythm”, Sassi explains. The wooden moulds, which are usually thrown away after use on construction sites, are here an integral part of Sassi’s work, offering them a second life. Through the marks left by the passage of time over their successive uses, the moulds give these abstract shapes a narrative aspect, breathing in the idea of a preexisting life here again.

The fact of working outside São Paulo for the first time –before arriving in Paris, Sassi designed and exhibited another series very recently as well, at Nosco Gallery (London)– had a strong impact on his work: not only did he have to adapt his techniques, but he also integrated elements from the European architecture –the metal plate which unites the three parts of “La fusion du triptyque pour l’intégrité de la cause” refers back, in its own way, to the vaulting of Gothic churches.