SAO PAULO.- Galeria Jaqueline Martins announced the representation of Pedro França. In his oeuvre, his daily experience is introduced through images that challenge the viewer to encounter something excessive and unclassifiable. Signs stolen from the world are all levelled out, made equal without hierarchy or valuation: images from art history, political news, mainstream cinema, homemade videos dug up on the internet, screen filters, family PowerPoints, and graphic design templates.
“…What moves me, most of all, in art and my practice as an artist is virtuality. It has nothing to do with technology. What we call virtual today, in technological terms, is a form of space collapse: myself, here, and you, there, communicating in the present. But the virtual also points to the past and the future. The past is the virtual presence of ancestry, while the future is the virtual presence of possibility. Dream, delirium, imagination, the relationship with the dead, all of this is virtual, and that's what I like. To close your eyes and see where remote pasts and futures lie. That way, my paintings, videos, digital works, urban projects are all connected to this problem/idea.
I'm not a single-media artist. But I'm also not an artist who changes media or materials very often. There is a set of "doings," such as painting, writing, editing, designing, that go together and are cyclically present in my daily practice. My challenge is to deepen the relationship with these "doings," so they lead me to their peculiar way of speaking and existing.
I try to do my works in a way that manages to open small cracks to another world: an imaginative glimpse of the future, a ghostly resonance to the past, or, if I'm lucky, the simultaneous presence of the two things." --Pedro França
“(...) equally peerless in the Brazilian contemporary landscape are Pedro França’s films. Part essay, part autobiography, part post-internet, part DIY, part found footage, part performance, part music video, they are always “a bit more” than any one of those genres. Too colourful, too corny, too violent, too emotional, too desperate, too tender, there is something excessive and unclassifiable to them: an elusive surplus that will not be reabsorbed into any system or set of equals. I will even go so far as to argue that this dimension of excess is there because video, to França, became a kind of total medium that encompasses all other mediums – and even the world. A medium whose specificity is its plasticity, its ability to say “yes” to everything." --Patrícia Mourão, curadora/curator
"In June 2020, the exhibition QUE VÃO QUE VEM, (Pedro França & Victor Gerhard), was launched on the website of Galeria Jaqueline Martins, designed especially for the digital ecosystem. We entered a shiny hyper-illuminated space, which seems to echo the luminosity radiated by the computer screens and by the consumption spaces of the so-called “real” world. There, you find an intense traffic between all sorts of drawings, paintings, and videos, in a game of scenes that, as has been said, “converts the visitor into a gamer in a virtual reality.” --Luisa Duarte, curadora/curator
An artist and member of Ueinzz Theatre Group, Pedro França (Rio de Janeiro, 1984) studied at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro between 2001 and 2005 and holds a Master Degree in Social History at PUC- Rio (Rio de Janeiro). Since 2011, Pedro França has been working as an artist in a variety of media, mainly paintings, installation and video. His work engages in schizo and metonymical rearrangements of images and objects, in both individual and collaborative practices.
