Tomaz Hipólito :: DEVOLUTION

The exhibition DEVOLUTION, by Tomaz Hipólito, stems from a process of work and research that goes back to Hipólito’s first experiences in his draw series (c. 2010) with drawing as gesture and performing agent on architecture, the body and its interaction with landscape, be it urban or rural, natural, as much as nature still persists in our modus vivendi and thus in our individual vs. collective imaginary.

For this exhibition, Tomaz Hipólito has developed a contradictory system of sculptural objects that subject us to an introspective view of our relationship with nature, its transformation and the whole field of possibilities that each of the sculptures evokes in its construction, which integrates the natural and the artificial, unifying these entities through the manuality of black painting and the addition of industrial materials.

However, this generic black only knows its settling over the wooden trunks and branches, which are the structure for these metaphorically bionic, hybrid entities, that transit between the vegetable, the animal, and the artificial. It is in this contradictory gesture that Hipólito performs an action on a video projection, where he executes a regular movement, repetitive in the manuality of painting, which will transform this videographic record, without altering it in the conditions generated by the digital medium, but which we will not be able to resist as bodies in the space of this painting that becomes drawing and remakes itself as sculpture in the exhibition space. We are left only with an ephemeral memory of matter and gesture.

DEVOLUTION is thus a succession of gestures that materializes a melancholic idea about the rescue of the memory of an idea of nature transformed by actions, images and reconfigurations that, in the immediate appearance of the eye, seem to be just a body, but that in the author's artistic practice reveal themselves as irreversibly transmuted beings.

João Silvério
November 2021