L’infra-mince c’est une différence infime qui singularise tout ce sur quoi elle designe.

Marcel Duchamp

 

On different silences is Renata Har’s first solo exhibition in Paris bringing together 14 of the artist’s recent works. Although drawing has been one of Har’s regular practices, she does not have a preferred medium or material; her work rather explores the possibilities of the environment and the world around her. For example, in the installation, Helmet (2012), a Second World War helmet found at a flea market is turned into a bathtub marking the material border between two silences: air and water. There is a subtle memory of pain experienced by others suggested and materialized in this small white bathtub in permanent movement and which occupies the space where once was the home of a head. The reuse or the incorporation of diverse objects and materials in the creation process gives the work a semantic force opening the sensitive field of experience to the production of a greater reality inside the work. The objects and materials travel between the studio, the street and the house over and over again. The work does not happen exactly in the studio, it exists in the studio, at home, in a suitcase and at the exhibition and it assumes different states in each particular context and changing shapes sometimes, as we notice in Flag (2013).

 

The works gathered here refer to a latent tension and instability: the bubbling water of the bath-helmet, the handful of glitter hold by the paper stuck on the wall in Podium (2014) or the paper-sculpture Island (2014) which serves as a pedestal for itself and floats in space. Following the artist: “Podium also refers to the intention to immortalize a moment that is fleeting by nature”1irony from the artist. Island depicts a page from an Atlas showing only the sea, becoming an atlas which has lost its sense of orientation and range. Weaving the semantic threads that connect one object to another, one material to another, one signifier to another, the volatility of human life emerges as well as and the timeless presence of things in such life. There is a sense of tension and expectation in the room below, everywhere, on the paper, and on the flowing white fabric.

 

Drawings are always created upon a suitable and available support, on a piece of notebook paper, on wrapping paper or on the most precious and charged with emotional memory as paper discovered in the cabinet of one’s deceased Italian grandfather, as in Sparkling ashes (2013). The artist's practice also includes a willingness to test the limits of the techniques, reversing the mediums, drawing leaves the paper goes toward the glass; lithography is performed on cloth as in Flag. Paper becomes sculpture as much as it can be used for making prints or collages, indicating that there is no ideal support.

 

Finally, in On different Silences (2014), the drawing performed on the glass façade of La Maudite consists of a gesture saying that invisibility is at the very center of visibility.

 

 

 

curated by Camila Bechelany

 

 

 

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1 Extrated from a conversation with the artist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Renata Har, born in São Paulo in 1981. Lives and works in Berlin. After beginning her studies in Fine Arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, Renata went to École des Beaux-Arts de Paris at Christian Boltanski’s atelier, where she graduated and finished her Masters degree. She was artist in residence at Agora, Berlin in 2012 and at Casa Tomada, São Paulo in 2013. Her work has been exhibited in many group shows as the 10th Bienal do Recôncavo, Bahia, Brazil, 2011, Wabi Sabi at Mendes Wood gallery, São Paulo in 2011, (NON) at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin in 2013. She has also been showing her work in art fairs like The Armory Show in 2012 and Berlin Art Preview 2012. She was pre-selected for Prix Keskar and Young Brazilian Artist Prize. Renata Har had her two latest solo shows ‘It is a long way’ at L’Atelier KSR and Sparkling Ashes at Team Titanic, both in Berlin and has an ongoing exhibition in collaboration with Conor Creighton at the “Schwules Museum” in Berlin.

 

 

Camila Bechelany is an independent curator and researcher working between Brazil and France. She received an M.A. from Tisch School of the Arts, NY, in Arts & Politics, and from EHESS, in Paris, in Social Anthropology, and is conducting her doctoral research at EHESS, in Paris, looking into exhibition practices and Brazilian identity in transnational context. She has worked at Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Centre Pompidou, Musée du quai Branly among other institutions. She attended the ICI Curatorial Program, in 2012, and collaborates as a researcher at the Research and Globalization Department, Centre Pompidou. She is also a collaborator at Select magazine, Sao Paulo.