braZil Series,
braZil, by Sergio Allevato, is a prolific series comprising works across a wide range of media, languages, and techniques that share one thing in common: they are also traps. They include oil paintings on linen, artist’s books, video works, installations, and sculptures in glass, wood, and UBS plastic. In these works, when we see a fruit, is it already a plant? Soon, it is neither one nor the other. In this fantastic universe, an animal can be vegetation, and a pineapple can be made of feathers.
In this way, he resumes a longstanding dialogue with nature, proposing new categories and hierarchies. After all, to which kingdom do Allevato’s beings belong? The laws governing this new world can only be discovered if we, too, become part of it—but in doing so, another trap seems to emerge: will we also undergo a mutation?
In working with Brazil’s native fauna and flora, perhaps the central question the multidisciplinary artist asks us is: what is there in Brazil beyond braZil? From the accounts of Pero Vaz de Caminha and Hans Staden to the images of Carmen Miranda and Walt Disney—all marked by the tropical exuberance of the New World—what is this country made of beyond what has been exported? Allevato plays with this historically constructed repertoire, sedimented by the entertainment industry. His irony thus balances two paradoxical elements: on the one hand, the strange, fresh, and renewed terrain constructed in his work; on the other, the sense of familiarity it evokes at first glance.
Across his varied body of work, the sensuality of color immediately catches the eye, yet at deeper levels, an ironic rigor gives the compositions their strength, reconciling complex sentiments such as passivity and hostility, freedom and confinement. His visual language is extravagant, playful, and acidic, while questions of identity and belonging are brought into play. Without offering easy answers. Quite the opposite. He questions and reworks historical narratives and the imaginary constructed around Brazil, interested in what the country has been and what it is, but also in everything it might yet become.
Christiane Laclau
Curator