Marcelo Cidade (Sao Paulo, 1979) gained a wide international reputation based on a critical dialogue with the legacies of the Brazilian avant-gardes of the last century. His dystopian approach to utopian ideas of different artistic groups and architectural tendencies spread in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro between the 1940s and 1970s, have created a panoply of iconic works of contemporary art that bring unresolved issues to the present using new materials. Materiality is central to Cidade’s practice, which conveys typologies of design that represent a given urban fabric and its grey zones of tensions. But perhaps the work that better describes Cidade’s relationship with the past and the context is the sculpture Tempo suspenso de un estado provisorio (2011) in which the artist presented a glass pane pierced with a bullet hole, mounted in an easel created by Lina Bo Bardi for the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo. Cidade’s gesture aimed to de-aes- theticized the radical architect’s celebrated display, repositioned art as a political window to reality. The work, which now belongs to the MASP collection, proposes a vitriolic link between the museum and Sao Paulo’s social political context.

What today is defined as a city, or a town is not less than the sums of the parts of the life (and death) that dwells and reverberates in its streets, buildings, and public spaces. Cidade aptly identifies the gaps between collective broken aspirations, local material culture and the remains of the public sphere in his hometown Sao Paulo or in Mexico City. His approach to these topics recalls Le Corbusier’s dictum, which stated that architects were not designers but organizers of production and consumption, anticipating the future contradictions of a discipline that precisely depend on life cycles, technological developments, and, of course, capital. From this perspective, Marcelo Cidade has developed a type of dysfunctional abstrac- tion in his sculptures, installations and bidimensional works that delves into the clashes between public policies and human behavior, one of the most difficult problems posited for architecture and urbanism. What kind of storefronts are typically used in Mexico? What are the colors that define Mexican culture? Or, how friendly is the build space design in relation to the creation of spaces for spontaneous interactions?

RGR is proud to present a comprehensive body of works by Marcelo Cidade including Ansiosa Ansiedade (2024) a new experimental sculpture specially created for the show based on a mechanism like a Moebius strip. The artist appropriated a typical Mexican storefront window to create a continuous movement, a kinetic element, which contrasts with the delicacy of the pink hue used to paint its surface. He also added two distinctive colors to covering adjacent walls of the gallery to create a Barraganesque environment that frame and contain the piece. The work brings nuances and fragmentary images and sounds of Mexico City that summarizes his poetic-political concerns about abstraction as a universal force and a space for the winds of freedom to blow.

Gabriela Rangel.