Coffee and Alphabets
Débora Bolsoni
8 September > 13 October 2018
Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain has the pleasure of presenting Débora Bolsoni’s first solo exhibition « Coffee and Alphabets ».
This exhibition consists of a patchwork of appropriations realized thanks to different materials or even simpler, the speech.
In addition to the intertextuality that the works possess in this presentation, they have in common the appropriationist device of the "speech" of the other.
As in Jim Jarmusch's film, "Coffee and Cigarrets" (2004), the artist takes advantage of meetings in bars or cafes to "gather" the alphabets. During these meetings, the nationality of the speakers is revealed through specific characteristics of each language.
Since 2004, Bolsoni saves this collection of lines, but this is the first time that her alphabets are presented in dialogue with other objects. Each of the three alphabets presented in this exhibition suggests a strong idea belonging to three groups of works - the utopian (Greek alphabet), the playful (Portuguese alphabet of Brazil) and the mystic (Tamil alphabet of Sri Lanka).
In the collages entitled "Letters" (part of the utopian group), the dismantling, interference and recombination of the graphic elements of the British and Danish flags result in a series of symbols, each corresponding to a letter. The language and the flag are the emblems of a nation. Therefore, they form part of the collective cultural experience. Nevertheless, because of the presentation device adopted by the artist, these two usual forms of cartography are cancelled by other forms of belonging that Bolsoni wants to treat with the idea that our most common means of orientation - language , flags and even images - are not absolute, but contingent and constructed.
The entire exhibition deals with the desire for reconstruction from certain psychic characteristics that can be perceived in matter. The artist tries to relay the affections exchanged between people to those that can emanate from objects. For this, the elements are deconstructed and recombined to highlight the powerful childlike joy of discovery, the affirmative lines of utopian projects, the physicality which is present in our desire for transcendence.
