Cadu It’s Gonna Rain
Galeria BWA SOKÓŁ in Nowy Sącz
Opening: 30 April 2015, 6 pm
Exhibition will run: 1 May – 14 June 2015
Curator: Anna Smolak
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.”
Henry Miller
The exhibition It’s Gonna Rain by the Brazilian artist Cadu reads like an analogue hypertext, full of looped narratives and topographical references. The works are stand-alone but they also build mutual relationships, like an experimental piece of music, in which sound is complemented by the text, movement or object. At the periphery of these overlapping languages, a space has been created for disruption, noise and action aborts. These are all indispensable for complementing the processes set in motion during the exhibition, summoning the realness of life in the context of art, founded on the destruction and rebirth of the concept of creation.
The presented works are open to other participants, engaging pent-up local potential, which they direct towards the themes that the artist himself has been exploring.
The title of the exhibition is derived from the piece of music by Steve Reich, who in 1965 achieved the effect of a mechanical loop, replaying on two reel-to-reel tape recorders the words ‘it’s gonna rain’. Formally, the piece was a precursor of electronic music. However, in the context of the apocalyptic message (the text alluded to the words of a pastor, which – in the face of the Cuba missile crisis – referred to the end of the world), the rhythmical repetition could be interpreted as an element intended to instil order, an attempt to seek harmony in a world getting out of control.
Cadu’s attitude to modernist music is entirely empirical. The artist is fascinated by borderline sound and spatial forms that transcend the instrument itself. Cadu derives rhythm from the repetition of contrasts; he finds it in natural cycles and in marking out topographic and distance pointers. A childlike curiosity and experimental instinct returns in Cadu’s works in the shape of toy mechanisms, modified to suit new meanings, as well as in natural history experiments and recycled materials.
Above all, however, Cadu’s art is a very personal, intimate quest and an attempt to place oneself in a relationship with the world that spans from the natural and elemental to the technological. Remaining poised between those opposites, the artist opens himself to the experimental process with full acknowledgement of errors and failures that gives his work its force and authenticity.
Anna Smolak
Cadu (Carlos Eduardo Felix da Costa) – an artist and educator. Has received numerous awards and residencies, including Residency Unlimited, New York (2014); InSite, Mexico City (2014); Pipa Prize, Brazil (2013), London Print Studio (2001). At the invitation of the Arts Council (UK) he was a visiting artist at the University of Plymouth (2008). In 2014 he participated in the project Plataforma Atacama (Chile). Most recent individual exhibitons: Vermelho (São Paulo), Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim and Laura Marsiaj (Rio de Janeiro), D21 (Santiago) and WU (Lima). Group exhibitions: Love and Hate to Lygia Clark – Zachęta National Art Gallery (Warsaw), 13th Istanbul Biennale, 3rd Festival of Art and Technology (Moscow), 30th São Paulo Biennale, Art in Brazil (Europalia Festival – Brussels), Panorama of Brazilian Art 2011 (São Paulo) and 7th Mercosul Biennale (Porto Alegre). Cadu is working on a post-PhD research programme at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The artist is represented by the Vermelho Gallery. Cadu lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
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