Alexsander Stav

Gustavo Marcio Rocha de Goes

360° Art

Where do we find inspiration to make a piece of art?

Gustavo Marcio Rocha de Goes encourages us to turn our heads 360° for new perspectives on our surroundings and each other.

In the production of the exhibition 360° Art, Goes has activated young students to create social relational artworks that reflect upon their every day lives and surroundings. Trough gathering visual information from each individual and creating large paintings based on the students sketches, the artist bring forward a sense of collective consciousness among the students. We are all in this world together, reality is a shared experience.

Relational art, is a tendency in fine art practice originally defined as, "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. The idea of Relational Art was developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998 in his book Esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics). The term was first used in 1996, in the catalogue for the exhibition Traffic curated by Bourriaud at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic included artists, such as Henry Bond, Vanessa Becroft, Maurizio Cattelan and Liam Gillick.

Gustavos solo exhibition consists of 2 installations and 10 paintings, each measuring 130 x 130 cm.

All of the exhibitions 10 large paintings are made of  36 square shaped canvases, that can be stored and transported in customized suitcases. The paintings then become sculptures, made to move independently around the world. The possibility for easy transportation of the paintings, indicates that they don’t belong to just one geographic location on our planet. The suitcases assist us in imagining a travelling piece of art, made to encounter other cultures and countries across the globe.

Whithin Goes exhibition there is also a mecanical piece of art, activated by sensors when a person come close to it. The work is a canvas sitting flat on the flor with a mecanical arm that continously draw circles onto the blank canvas. The automatic painting refers to the exhibition title 360° Art, as it repeats its perfect circular movement. Drawing perfect circles has also been the practice of eastern Buddhist munks trough centuries, used in rituals of meditation. Looking at the piece trough this perspective, Gustavos mecanical artwork becomes an automatic meditating machine as the circle draws stronger with time.

Text written by Norwegian Artist and Curator

Aleksander Stav

2011