Cassio Vasconcellos, “Arizona”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “Ceasa”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “Coletivo”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “Harley”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “Janelas”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “E Nois”
Cassio Vasconcellos, “Verde”
Press Release
It is a great honor for Art+ Shanghai Gallery to host the first solo exhibition of Cassio Vasconcellos as part of THE MONTH OF BRAZILIAN CULTURE IN CHINA.
Cássio Vasconcellos is regarded as a leading Brazil contemporary photographer. Exploring urban and nature landscapes in his work, Vasconcellos practice is not to document the scenery but to approach the world of art in his photoscapes.
For this first exhibition in Shanghai Cássio Vasconcellos will present photographic landscapes, both natural and urban as emotional metaphorical. The images are not a replica of reality in front of the camera, but the subjective gaze of the artist a emotive viewer.
Exhibition Brief:
About “Coletivos” Series:
The exhibit Coletivos by photographer Cássio Vasconcellos explores a globalized world through the mosaics of constructed images. Viewers approach large panels of aerial photos that appear as geometric constructions and texture paintings. On closer inspection the faraway landscapes contain rich detail composed of everyday urban lives and stories.
Images such as “Ceasa,” “A Praia,” “É Nois” and “Coletivo” are captured using unique angles and exaggerated scales of everyday activities such as fresh food markets, beach-goers on a sunny day, crowed encounters and parked vehicles.
Cássio Vasconcellos uses fragmented images of real scenes to create fantasy backgrounds. The images convey a sense of a non-place; a non-relational spatial entity that does not conform to any kind of identity. ——Micaela Neiva, Curator
About “Noturnos” Series:
Vasconcellos’s photographs seem to show a São Paulo that doesn’t exist. It is difficult to recognize the city in those images, where old construction fences and viaducts, chipped facades and debris seem to belong to another time, in opposition to the present city. Modern constructions, deserted, bathed in an oblique light, create an intensely plastic universe, oddly scenographic. Urban elements that look abandoned, without a clear function, forever unfinished. Gigantic structures, emerging from the night, dominate the urban landscape, and the remaining fall in dimness, in the most complete entropy.
The photographer restores a vigor that things seemed to have lost when they definitely dived in the kingdom of the disposable. Bringing to surface the mystery that nests in details, in fragments, in the abandoned. He operates in the gaps of the current urban landscape’s pasteurized continuum, where the prospect of new configurations and new meanings open up.
What does rescue this photographer’s solitary adventure, then? Cássio Vasconcellos doesn’t intend to show where things are, to map. The intense light he throws on things actually blinds. It allows you to walk through the city as if you had your eyes tight shut. His enterprise is essentially a tactile one. It is what allows him to discover the tangible presence of everything that, at first, one cannot see. ——Nelson Brissac, Philosopher and director of the Arte/Cidade Project
