The Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira (born 1973) transfers the dynamic decay he finds at the borders of his native São Paolo to the very heart of Paris. Working with painting, sculpture and installation, Oliveira unleashes a vibrant series of organic (almost parasitic) forms, textures and colors. He combines the very flesh of his native city (through the use of found wood scraps) with a wide spectrum of art historical and scientific references. (…) The Penetrables that Oiticica exhibited at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1969, at once a snapshot of Brazilian favelas and a cohesive development of Color Field Painting, were vivid environments in microcosm. In much the same way, in Oliveira’s work, “gestures become landscapes,” he says, or “fluid environments, little universes inside other universes.”
Lillian Davies
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Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a work that combines the vegetal and the organic to emerge. The building itself becomes the womb that produces this volume of « tapumes » wood, a material used in Brazilian towns to construct the wooden palisades that surround construction sites.
Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2013
Plywood and tree branch — 23 × 39 × 69 ft.
Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris
Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2013
Plywood and tree branch — 23 × 39 × 69 ft.
Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris
Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2013
Plywood and tree branch — 23 × 39 × 69 ft.
Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris
Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2013
Plywood and tree branch — 23 × 39 × 69 ft.
Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris
Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2013
Plywood and tree branch — 23 × 39 × 69 ft.
Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Henrique Oliveira, Transarquitetonica, 2014, 2014
Wood, bricks, mud, bamboo, PVC, plywood, tree branches and other materials — 5 × 18 × 73 m
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo — Brazil — photo: Everton Ballardin
Like his previous works, Transarquitetonica was built from ‘tapumes’, which reference the wooden construction fences seen in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Henrique Oliveira uses this flexible material to make the man-made cave system look like a set of roots from the outside. This work recreates the feeling of walking through a system of gigantic, hollow roots and immerses its viewers by letting them explore its wooden chambers and become lost within the cavernous interior.
« It’s wood that has been taken from nature, has been cut down into geometric structures, and they have been used by society and discharged. And I take it back and I rebuild forms there again, creating true nature forms. It’s bringing back the tree aspects to the material, » explained the artist. « It’s not just an object, it’s an experience. »
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