Travessia: Alexandre da Cunha

Luisa Strina is pleased to present Travessia, a solo exhibition by Alexandre da Cunha at the gallery. Bringing together four new sculptures and two wall pieces, Travessia reflects a new moment in the artist's practice, challenging the capacities of functional objects between the public and private spheres, and highlighting the interplay of cultural duality within the artist's work. The exhibition essay is signed by Luisa Duarte.

Alexandre da Cunha uses everyday elements which are not typically associated with art codes in his sculptures. His works create new symbols and meanings through manipulating, cutting, and joining different objects. The artist's trajectory and practice, living and working between the UK and Brazil, are intrinsically related to a duality of references adopted in his work — in which the use of objects taken from daily life reflects their cultural character and use. Between the British capital and São Paulo, the act of crossing (Travessia) gains a double meaning: the path between two continents—two different cultural, social, and geographical contexts — and, with this, the crossing of a new frontier in his practice. Travessia has thus become a continuous movement of personal and professional transformation for the artist.

The exhibition presents works from the series Mina (2024), featuring four vertical water fountains created from stacked “orelhão” (payphone) structures, sculptures resembling totems standing at over two and a half meters in height. With commercial trademarks removed from their surfaces, these structures form a long colorful composition. Their base is made of concrete commonly used in civil construction or landscaping projects. Everything is bathed in water, which reflects the object itself and reproduces the sound of the liquid when it comes into contact with the sculpture's surface.

"I like to think of the payphones as acoustic shells, where various people and stories have passed— from calls to family in the countryside, to declarations of love and arguments. Unlike a phone booth, where you step in to have a conversation, the payphone represents a semi-private space, where your speech and body are partially shielded, yet remain exposed and vulnerable", says Da Cunha.

Transformed, even if we don't recognize the emblematic Brazilian public telephones in the composition, a keen eye can observe the persistence of the graphics, cracks, and especially the marks of time and use. Thus, Alexandre da Cunha's works, which invariably tend to point to various effects and reflections, constitute — in the artist's own words — an archeology for the future, made of traces of everyday life that take on other formats and functions.

Mina somehow picks up a formal discussion between plinth and sculpture recurring in Constantin Brancusi's columns (1876–1957), and also also sparks a debate about the relationship between public and private, as the water fountains, evocative of a public square space, are brought into the gallery space. The opening of the exhibition room to the garden expands the arena for the interplay between these two environments. This is also a work that develops the artist's research with kinetic elements — in this object, possibly considered 'dead' and obsolete, water becomes a source of life, in an allegorical celebration of the world's crossings.

The exhibition's title, Travessia, refers to the eponymous work, a sculpture crafted from a self-portrait photograph of the artist. Around the image of his bust, there is a necklace made of steel cable and various fishing buoys, arranged in ascending order of size. Two eyelets pierce the photograph, crossing the necklace behind the piece. The image of Da Cunha in an informal context contrasts with the ritualistic symbolism of the necklace and the bust itself in art history, while the buoys also dialogue with the theme of water.

The artist reflects on a parallel that attempts to celebrate all vulnerabilities, between the new and the old, life and death. "The act of exposing my image carries an element of fragility in itself, which also speaks to the vulnerability of the object itself — often broken, cracked, or forgotten", he adds. Despite there being a certain camouflage of the objects used and the deep — formal and conceptual — reflections stimulated by the works, nothing can conceal their witty sense of humor.

Read here the curatorial essay by Luisa Duarte.