Marcelo Cidade. Roads not taken
Marcelo Cidade, Roads not taken, Installation view, ph. courtesy Isisuf
Robert Frost wrote in The Road not taken (1916): Then I took the other, as just as fair/, And having perhaps the better claim,/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear/ Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same,/ And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black./ Oh, I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted if I should ever come back./ I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/ I took the one less travelled/ And that has made all the difference. A difference which turns back into a road in the hands of Marcelo Cidade (1978, San Paolo, Brazil).
The Brazilian artist, at his first solo show in Italy, has been recording and honing, for almost a decade, the state of the street art, using informal and subversive practices between the realms of Modernism and urban domain.
Cidade, within this Isisuf project, celebrates the artistic spontaneous intervention, while contributing, at the same time, to the continuous and immersive transformation of the city – a universe that, according to Cidade’s visions, activates and contaminates every contemporary art form. The abundance of anti-authoritarian rituals and the application of signals, properly created to define an exterior world, make installations, interventions and artistic operations dedicated and realistic roads not taken. Not-chosen, but not forsaken, ways where never drifting away from their specific illegal aura and a structural aesthetic of vandalism. Both of this dimensions are deeply anchored to a Modernist sense for space and to its identità, a legacy which Cidade draws upon powerfully.
The whole of the urban texture represents for the Brazilian artist a territorial genome and a language style, a dimension that must be modified and manipulated: neither completely embraced nor totally rejected. Streets, walls, rubbles, security systems, all the cold nights, roller shutters, paintings, ceilings and mere ruins become part of a defined spatial system. A syntax of reality which in every project is explored, translated and analyzed according to precise samples of meaning.
In Rome, Cidade will work on geometries, codes and dissimulations within the Italian capital, letting changing tracks emerge as a new approach for the actual contemporary art scenarios. His artworks will reflect poetic impressions, marked into city’s history and nature. Nothing inside his constructive performance practice is just representation or simple decoration: Cidade is a foremost rebel dissimulator. He measures the sensation of foreign territories just using them, as a kind of reaction, as a white sheet, as a surface subjected to the whole physical reality. A subtext which describes a complex conceptual network composed by effects, actions and reproductions, all ready -at the first need- to overrun the cradle of traffic. Surveillance devices, control mechanisms, defensive tactics and border obstacles, distributed into the Cidade’s artwork, bring the gaze upon a peculiar road not taken which often is a critic trace of a distant nature, abroad from the theater of art. Marcelo Cidade exhibiting Roads not taken means to watch over Rome, describing its urban diversity statute.
Through this solo show, the artist avoids every loss of experience because he rather directly touch the external world, im-mediatly crossing his first intervention field: the city. It follows that becomes necessary a comparison with denial, intuition and digression between the availbility of things and the perfect distance from products. Thanks to this project Cidade allegorically takes possession of architectures and open-air volumes, settling a path in reverse, a sort of perceptive reading which only allows a forbidden limit to emerge. His sculptural sense for space comes up to insistently scrape structural origins of every theoretical foundation, transforming the non-presence of Nature in an opportunity to circunscribe new portions of space. Cidade into this new project reveals the city as a symbol, a metaphor of a denied part, a real certainty that every place I saw/ every place I visited/ now that I know to be certain about it:/ I’ve never been before (Robert Frost).
4th December 2010 – 31th January 2011
Marcelo Cidade. Roads not taken (betwen San Paolo and Rome)
An Isisuf project curated by Atto Belloli Ardessi and Ginevra Bria
Furini Arte Contemporanea Gallery
Via Giulia 8, 00186 Rome
Marcelo Cidade, Roads not taken, Installation view, ph. courtesy Isisuf
Marcelo Cidade, Roads not taken, Installation view, ph. courtesy Isisuf
Marcelo Cidade, Roads not taken, Installation view, ph. courtesy Isisuf
Marcelo Cidade, Roads not taken, Installation view, ph. courtesy Isisuf
