Untitled: Galeria Luisa Strina

TONICO LEMOS AUAD The Luisa Strina Gallery shows a solo exhibition of the artist Tonico Lemos Auad (1968) from April 15th until May 15th of 2003. The exhibition includes instalations made of carpet and gold chains, as well as pieces made of felt fixed on the walls. The work of Tonico Lemos Auad sees a personal and poetic expression of daily experiences and perceptions that are often not noticed or remembered. His practice seeks to rediscover those moments that often vanish before our eyes and to re-present them so that we might be afforded the opportunity to look again. The artist uses different medias that, in some point, they meet theirselves, because of their poetry or their physical fragility.

His drawings made with gold chains are often slight, delicate interventions into spaces, so benign in their physical presence that it is possible to blink and miss them. Yet the images that the chain drawings depict are not delicate in their content, they do not attempt to capture the personal sentimentality or emotive history inherent in the Lost Gold piece. Instead, the drawings illustrate the sinister, seedier connotations of cheap gold with one of the chains spelling ‘Boca de Ouro’ or ‘Gold Mouth’, a nickname for a crook who features in novels by Nelson Rodrigues.

The sense of physical and emotional fragility found in the jewellery drawings, is a quality inherent throughout Auad’s work. The experience of tip toeing across one of his carpet pieces, where fugitive squirrels with their fluffy physiques inhabit a vast polyester landscape, is akin to trespassing through a private garden. As an intruder you become oversized, clumsy, you are forced to tread softly and to take care as you run the risk of destroying a rare moment of wonder, which you have been given the opportunity to witness.

Tonico Lemos Auad lives in London since 1998, where he concluded his mastery in Art at Goldsmith College, on 2000, and where he participated on the resident programme at Gasworks Gallery, on 2001, where he keeps a studio and with whom he carries through colaborativos projects.

Regarding to the exhibitons of this year, the artist shows his works in Berlin, at the Galerie Wiensowsi & Harbord, from April 11th, and he will have another solo exhibition in Dublin, at the Project Gallery, during the second semester of 2003.