SAO PAULO.- Galeria Jaqueline Martins São Paulo opened pedro frança's De ontem pra hoje já era amanhã. Featuring large-size paintings, a video installation, urban project models and furniture specially designed by the artist for the occasion, the exhibition is the first by the Rio de Janeiro-born artist in the gallery and runs from November 17 to January 22, 2022.

Almost a decade ago, pedro frança dreamed there was “a sun for each person.” Above every head, a scorching private heat, concentrated within the space of a stationary time. In this muggy weather, each body was sweating bullets, and overflowing with their own moisture, they wet the ground they stood on.

*
Faced with a life permeated by antiperspirants, drywall, drying oil, silica and so many other dehumidifiers, pedro has been interested in humecting his work. Anointing the said work requires, however, that we flood the dryness that is politically and socially imposed upon what surrounds us.

Such is what informs Projeto de restauro da várzea na região do Monumento às Bandeiras[2] (2020) – render, which prophesizes the moment the famed landmark marking the 4th Centennial of the City of São Paulo, a cynical praise of the genocide perpetrated by Bandeirante explorers, will be reclaimed by water. Beneath the São Paulo drizzle and in the company of a strident tropicality of fauna and flora, in pedro frança’s evocation, the 12,000-ton granite sculpture set (1954) by Victor Brecheret sinks down, predestined to return to its original condition as mud.

*
The fact that the libertarian Canudos community and the bloody eponymous war recounted by Euclides da Cunha has been overrun by water triggers, in pedro frança, a contrarian thirst – to set afire. Thus, was born the Cinematroz project, a concept for an underground movie theater set in the ground once set alight by Antônio Conselheiro.

Like a monumental bolide, incendiary images unfold in this unlikely movie theater: slash-and-burns, fire barricades, rebellions. Within the fictional dimension of the painful theater the inflamed memory of that territory becomes reinvigorated, in spite of and running counter to all the flooding. Evoking the memory of Conselheiro’s prophecy that “the backlands will turn to sea,” Cinematroz admonishes that not every fire can be put out with water.

Among renders and mockups, frança’s has devoted his oeuvre to envisioning urbanistic incantations of the social memory of a pyromaniac Brazil brought to ruin amidst the smoke of a (yet) eternal crossfire.

*
In the artist’s dream, we were in Maracanã Stadium: we, the living, as well as the others. For each living being there was one of these others, standing lightly on their shoulders. Between the undead and the living, ancestralized bodies were created – remaining between pasts, presents, and futures. Boasting a sun for each one, Maracanã was sweltering.

The memory of that dreamlike heat unfolded into Proposta para Memorial Maracanã[3] (2021), a video created in partnership with Darks Miranda: a fictional news report set in 2022, where the famous stadium appears with its traditional uses deactivated, becoming a colossal bonfire lit up in the exact three days of the middle of the year.

Set to burn in the north side of Rio de Janeiro, Maracanã expurgates the traumas of the place – from the history of indigenous genocide to the 1950 and 2014 World Cup finals defeats – and it does not allow night to fall, or bodies to rest under the heat. The big stadium-turned-bonfire enunciates the social malaise that extrapolates the artist to become monumental.

*
As the installation Thanos, Futebol, Mortes e Emprego (2020) diagnoses in an exacerbated way, because we are nauseated and cornered by necropolitics, our discomfort with the neutralization and emptying of death – stripped of its fears, passions, reverences memories, rites – inhabits the works featured in the show De ontem pra hoje já era amanhã.

While its presence has been notable throughout the artist’s career, it is certainly undeniable that the recent pandemic experience around the world has underscored it. Seeing as it is unavoidable, it seems urgent that death be occupied with imagery that does not reify ongoing necropolitics, nor vie for it with the arbitrary, colonial violence of the world. Blurring the boundaries of death, in that sense, seems to be one of pedro frança’s key gestures.




*
Out of the Maracanã dream, the artist kept alive the sensation of bodies which, though not typically alive, aren’t dead either. They do not perambulate like zombies because the nostalgia of life does not interest them, and so they abdicate the insistence on living to enter the world of the dead, as though unaware of any other condition of existence. Dead, therefore, is something they effectively cannot be. And in their undead condition they set about coexisting with us.

pedro frança makes his painting into a place where he has been able to die while living, or put differently, where he remains alive even when considered dead.

*
Escaping the constraints of death to achieve an undead condition requires doing nothing. Resisting the obligation of dying, as well as the desire to survive, can breed alternative existences.

Thus, the inhabitants of pedro frança’s paintings keep on – beyond life and death. While they are always acting, his characters however do very little. Unambitious, they occupy one another with themselves. They have a lot to do in order to keep doing nothing.

In their almost always naked bodies “there is eroticism, but not always; there is joy, but not always; there is death, but not always; there is care, tenderness, there is loneliness; there is a bit of everything, but none of it is “always there.” A diffuse malaise, but also gestures of hope and pleasure,” in the artist’s own words. While seemingly inactive in the scale of their gestures and the scant representativeness of their enigmatic sceneries, it is precisely in the gerund of their continuous affairs that these undead enunciate what their lives can do.

Far removed from messianisms – well-meaning as these may be – and from their obsession with exterminating that or those that haunt them, they do not seem to refute the world as it is, as they refuse to reform it or ultimately to desert it. Going against the grain of revolutionary responsibilities and the ethics of renunciation, the figures slowly and boastingly display the guts to go on doing nothing when everything seems to indicate it would be best to actually do something meaningful – including the tragic final act of abdicating any and all doing.

One must note, however, that the non-grandiloquence of their actions renders them not irrisory but woven in minute subjectivities. Each movement, position, touch, color, ornament, anatomy, hair is thus made radically unique. At once together and alone, these prosaic entities travel through clear, sparking worlds whose warmth is expressed in bodies made into flames and the stickiness that implies ones unto others as though bound by the sweat, the tears, the cum, the saliva and the urine that exasperate in this feverish world.

*
Between the humidity and the heat, the mire and the fire, pedro frança’s De ontem pra hoje já era amanhã outlines a social atmosphere that combines mourning and transformation.

Exploring technologies almost always at the service of sterile, whitened-down visions of the future, the artist’s renderings and mockups prophesize a sticky, muddy, unbearably hot world inhabited but humid, heavy, sluggish bodies. A world that is not only grieving – awaiting the day its own prophecy will be fulfilled – but which, on another direction, also chooses to anticipate it by making it into image, painting, film project.

In doing so, pedro affiliates himself with the forces which, by imagining the future, at one evoke it and perform it in its daily manufacturing through paint, fabric, drawings, grooves, models, edits, sounds: “Doing something is always a bet on the future. Giving shape means believing that there will be a tomorrow, and that there will be other tomorrows,” the artist confesses. Doing means, at least, the possibility of staying warm. And sweating.

[1] Lit. Trans.: From yesterday to today it was already tomorrow

[2] Lit. Trans.: The Bandeiras Monument floodplains restoration project

[3] Proposal for Maracanã Memorial

pedro frança argues that although painting has always been part of his practice, this is the first time a set of such works takes centerstage in a new showing of his. He names the pandemic as the biggest reason behind this shift. The exercise of the day-to-day, or of the present tense, is a practice that not only creates the necessary space in which to create his art, but also speaks to the artist’s conceptual interests. frança finds that the notion of virtuality – taken not as technological jargon, but as a means for overriding distances as well as instances of time – emerges as an element that may correlate possible pasts and futures toward one single problem. 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. 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.