The appropriation of images is a practice that has dramatically intensified in recent decades. Since then, incorporating images from the most diverse origins is one of the characteristics of contemporary production, often mixing different materials and techniques. The Transformers exhibition at auroras highlights the diverse use of the image that is articulated by Leda Catunda, Arthur Chaves, Pedro França and Robert Rauschenberg

The purpose of approaching these works is not to try to rescue a pop experience, nor just to observe its inflections in the country, but to investigate the new paradigms in which the image is placed today.

The act of appropriation also means bringing the object to the present moment. This movement must question, like all historical objects, the validity and the new meanings of these images at the moment they are being summoned, at the same time that, in a dialectical movement, it must resignify the past. In this way, the writing projected in the work of Pedro França is, at the same time, revealing and childish. The text “fuck the past” is an image as much as the other elements, it is equivalent to the collage of the dog or the reproduction of the painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528). Its inconsequential pampered, pseudo-anarchist character is confronted by the evocation of the naked body that refers to a golden past, both carrying a certain dose of idealism.

In Pedro França’s compositions, procedures of “ctrl+c + ctrl+v”, sampling and détournement, bring together a series of images that tend to be (dis)organized into different layers. The color planes that fill the background try to somehow create a common chromatic relationship to join a series of attempts that may seem inconsequential. And if the use of these types of words appears frequently, it must be less for the artist’s personality and more for a way of dealing with images in contemporary times. The accumulation of dispersed images that marked the production of Pedro França is, in this new moment, condensed in a single delimited and ideal space that is the pictorial plane of the canvas.

Os foguetes (1990) by Leda Catunda are part of a series developed from the 1980s onwards called fences. The procedure of covering parts of the print, highlighting and decontextualizing images brought from a collective archive, ends up creating a link between the disparate elements that are used in the artist’s work. This editing procedure seeks to desaturate, in a way, a universe crammed with the most diverse images. In Nove e Novinho II (2013), the composition of emblems, sponsors and geometric-chromatic patterns is again stitched together by the common use of paint. In these cases, the support is the content of the work itself, making its “painting” no longer the representation of the thing, but the thing itself.

Therefore, the usually flat nature of the image supports is sometimes questioned, at other times reinforced. The collage and the way Chaves and Catunda manipulate the materials tend to give corporeity to this supposed two-dimensionality. The virtuality of the images in the work of Catunda and Chaves is confronted by the materiality and the strong tactile appeal that their paintings-objects carry.

Bringing together materials of different natures that would seem incompatible, in the same way, that they approach images, Arthur Chaves’ compositions intend the traditional two-dimensionality of wall objects, creating hollow elements, layers and volumes. Drawing assumes a fundamental position to structure his research with the materiality of fabrics and plastics, leftovers and waste, sometimes softer, sometimes firmer. Thus, embedding images is just another process to create complex fields of depth informed by a drawing, contradictorily precise and anarchic.

The sewing machine was a metaphor for the almost savage and automatic confrontation of images in the surrealist experience. It is curious that Arthur Chaves uses this tool that fixes, even if precariously, a heterogeneous set of fragments, creating amorphous structures that are drawn throughout the intuitive process of association.

Finally, LA Uncovered #6 (1998) by Robert Rauschenberg, comprises in its space, traditional images from the American repertoire: on the frame that the red brick wall creates at the base of the composition, an image announces the sale of a “famous store department of New York” that went bankrupt. The circulation of images through a mass culture, which would be an essential part of Rauschenberg’s production, seems to be contemplated in this series of works that seek to deconstruct an imaginary of Southern California.

The diverse nature of each image is confronted with others in a space of friction. Whether in a scroll that approaches contents that in no way resemble, in the logic of superimposing layers of a video, the relationship between text and image – with the primacy increasingly intense of the latter – and the ink that tries to calm the noises in a kind of patchwork unit. It is from these unlikely confrontations that new connections are built, ideas (and images) are rarely ordered in a linear way, and this disorder is part of their beauty.