PAS TOI

Fabio Cardoso

From Mar 05 to Apr 03 2009

The works shown in the Pas Toi exhibition is an outgrowth of the research conducted by Fabio Cardoso since 2002, when he participated in the São Paulo Art Biennial. In an elaborate process, the artist "prints" objects on canvases covered in paint. Using varied time frames to keep the object on the ink ? the longer, more material impregnates the surface ?, as well as using the turpentine solvent, Cardoso makes paintings without a brush. He prefers to call the process a "picture" instead of a "print", as the picture is a print made from the light.

In the Pas Toi series, the artist only used black colour, as "only black dye is real, the others are colouring" ?, but the screens are then involved in an acrylic coloured capsule. He wanted to use a "veiling, giving colour and volume to the work", he explains. The acrylic was produced especially for the works, according to specifications of the colour and thickness determined beforehand by the artist.

The screens are objects of the artist's day-to-day life, like old brushes, hammers, scissors, pieces of wood, and chains. "I used everything that showed up", he says. "These are extensions of my hands, though I barely touch the work. I actually only spill paint and get things dirty", he jokes.

The acrylic cover gives the idea that the objects are immersed in a liquid mass. "The objects are only suggested, but these don't really stand for anything. Painting is not abstract, nor figurative. The eye that organises the work.

While devoted to his work, Cardoso says he thought of several different things, "such as on the poem Charm, by Emily Dickinson, the sequence of The Sorcerer's Apprentice when Mickey animates the objects to do the cleaning themselves, Vermeer, the ambers and its insects, and in amulets."