SAO PAULO.- infrastructure, institution, individual, Daniel de Paula's second solo exhibition at Galeria Jaqueline Martins, updates and gives continuation to the conceptual artist's critical investigations into the violent social relations that dominate us and also transform space in order to satisfy the needs of our modern capitalist society: to produce and exchange commodities.

Through a rigorous juxtaposition of objects, texts, and immaterial procedures, and informed by a self-critical stance, de Paula reveals the interrelationship of his own artistic production, the commercial context of Galeria Jaqueline Martins, and the disposition of a vast global infrastructural spatial system; all parts —albeit asymmetrical— implicated in the social, political, economic, and environmental catastrophes that result from the competitive logic of the production of value within our capitalist sociability.

In infrastructure, institution, individual, Daniel de Paula presents a diverse lexicon of materials and processes coined over the last few years, in which the artist has been featured in relevant exhibitions of the global cultural circuit in institutions such as: Bienal de São Paulo, Lyon Biennale, The Renaissance Society of Chicago, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, The Arts Club of Chicago, Kunsthal Gent, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea di Milano, among others.

Amidst the works developed for infrastructure, institution, individual, the artist presents — through a dialectical relationship between appearance and essence, light and shadow, physicality and actions — a bureaucratic intervention on the gallery's light supply system, objects coming from public auctions of unserviceable materials from energy generation and urban mobility companies, graphic paintings impregnated with corpse scent used to train sniffer dogs in the context of infrastructural disasters, and also legal instruments for the purchase and sale of shadows of objects and people.

de Paula points to the latent contradictions that reside between the means and the intentions in the artistic creation that is part of a mercantile system — that reproduce the ideologies of capital, property, labor, and value — and formulates urgent questions about the fetishistic character of art, questioning the positive perception of the artistic field as autonomous, supposedly disentangled, and merely representative of a world in crisis; thus suggesting a more conscious and contradictory stance as a starting point for critical discourse of the present.

Daniel de Paula
Boston, USA, 1987.
Lives and works between São Paulo (Brazil) and Amsterdam (Netherlands).

The multiple propositions of Daniel de Paula intend to reflect on the production of space as a reproduction of power dynamics, thus revealing critical investigations of the political, social, economic, historical and bureaucratic structures that shape places and relationships. Through a posture that is not imprisoned in the field of visual-arts, his practice and production is intersected by notions of geography, geology, architecture and urbanism, something that reveals his interest in understanding the complex social form hidden within the materiality. Through strategies such as extensive negotiations with and between public and private agencies, appropriation, displacement and decontextualization of everyday objects, in addition to interactions with agents that constitute the exhibition space and its surroundings, de Paula’s works try to propose re-significances of rigid and conditioned space systems. Such procedures end up emphasizing the indivisibility between the physicality of his works and the contexts from which they arise, reiterating the criticism to the violent socio-political vectors that inscribe meaning into our lives.

Recent solo exhibitions include ‘inalienable, imprescriptible and unseizable’, LABOR Gallery, Ciudad de Mexico (2023); ‘veridical shadows, or the unfoldings of a deceptive physicality’, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, Brussels (2021); ‘the control of things over subjects is the control of subjects over themselves’, Galeria Francesca Minini, Milan (2019); ‘the conductive form of dominant flows’, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo (2017); ‘testemunho’, Galeria Leme, São Paulo (2015) and ‘objetos de mobilidade, ações de permanência’, White Cube Gallery, São Paulo (2014).

His works have also been included in recent institutional exhibitions such as Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2022); São Paulo’s 34th International Biennial, Brazil (2021), ‘Brasile. Il coltello nella carne’, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy (2018), ‘Matriz do Tempo Real’, MAC, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); ‘Avenida Paulista’, MASP, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); ‘Metrópole: Experiência Paulistana’, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); ‘Nós entre os Extremos’, Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil (2015); ‘Da próxima vez eu fazia tudo diferente’, PIVÔ, São Paulo (2012).

Since 2020, Daniel de Paula has been supported by the Mondriaan Fund (Netherlands).