LONDON.- Mazzoleni, London presents the exhibition Iran do Espírito Santo, in collaboration with Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel. Open from 30 May to 6 September 2024, the exhibition marks Iran do Espírito Santo’s first solo show in London in 10 years and is composed of two concise bodies of work: a group of watercolours and a group of sculptures. The exhibition deals with themes of domesticity: ideas of enclosure, disclosure, light, chance and absence.

Espírito Santo (b.1963, Mococa, Brazil) initially worked in an architect studio and a photography studio, specialising in black and white photography. He then developed his current artistic practice, while also working as an illustrator for several years. His architectural background is evident within his work, with Brazilian modernist architecture and his home of São Paulo influencing both form and colour within his oeuvre. His muted, monochromatic palette emerged from São Paulo’s concrete landscape, with the organised geometry of modernist architecture translated into the precise aesthetic of his compositions, much like his experience with black and white photography.

In his debut exhibition at Mazzoleni, Espírito Santo presents four sculptures which utilise distinct materials: stone, glass and metal. Each sculpture presents an accurate representation of a real object’s shapes and proportions, while simultaneously playing with the scale and materiality. For three decades this has been a constant strategy for the artist, exploring ordinary objects that are usually neglected due to their banality. With the restriction of the materials, Espírito Santo converges the tangibility of matter and the conceptual nature of artificial objects, using geometrical definitions that are implicit in them. The material’s density and weight conflict with the image quality of the sculptures, as exemplified in Luz Negra (2022), where the hyperreal finishing, not found in a functional light bulb, is elevated from the ordinary to the realm of auratic icon.

My process of making sculptures involves a return to the design project, that is, a re- idealization of certain objects, which are mostly anonymous. It’s an essentially different operation from using a found object, a readymade, or making a cast of an object. My sculpture is not indexical. Instead of reproducing an actual object, it alludes to its technical drawing, to the conception of its shape and dimensions. --Iran do Espírito Santo, 2021

In a separate space, a selection of watercolours on paper are exhibited, which go further to explore the intricacies involved in Espírito Santo’s work. These works are also created from meticulous observations of real objects. Luz Negra IX (2021) moves to reawaken us from our habitual indifference towards the everyday, instead communicating the beauty that can be found in the mechanics of human existence. The artist’s watercolours, a traditionally fluid medium, are controlled and contained and just like the sculptures, are composed of basic geometrical forms that are gathered to create a recognisable sign. Espírito Santo explains that “In many of my works, abstraction and concreteness are brought together as two poles that parallel the human existential condition, which is compulsorily subject to concrete reality and abstract thinking.”

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in Mococa, Brazil in 1963. Often working on an ambitious scale, he wryly subverts the Minimalist tradition through his abstracted sculptures of familiar everyday objects made strange by their disorientating size and incongruous materials, such as granite, glass, steel, copper or stone. These sculptural works strip away all extraneous detail, emphasizing the essential line and form of the object. This rigorous simplicity carries through to his demanding wall drawings in paint and sgraffito that transform the entire gallery through subtle gradations of tone and hypnotic repetition of pattern but require many weeks to complete. It was a combination of these two aspects of his practice which comprised the artist’s first UK solo exhibition, at Ingleby Gallery during Edinburgh Art Festival 2010. In the past two decades, Iran do Espírito Santo has received much international acclaim and his works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, and are included in the collections of many prominent museums such as: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, MAXXI, Rome, IMMA, Dublin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has also made substantial contributions to the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007), the Bienal de São Paulo (1987), and the Istanbul Biennal (2000). Recent exhibitions have included Reflexivos at Oi Futuro, Brazil (2019) and Chosen Memories - Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, MoMA, USA (2023).