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18/10 2010 – 30/10 2010


Adriano Costa, Ana Luiza Dias Batista, Carolina Cordeiro, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Débora Bolsoni, Erika Verzutti, Felipe Cohen, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, João Loureiro, Lucia Koch, Luciana Martins, Marcelo Cidade, Mauro Piva, Mauro Restiffe, Nicolas Robbio, Rodrigo Andrade, Thiago Rocha Pitta


Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present the group show Sempre a Vista (Miragem) (Always in Sight) on view September 18 – October 30, 2010. The exhibition brings together 18 artists in the first curatorial project of São Paulo-based artist Rodrigo Matheus.

“We live in a world which expresses itself in a largely visual manner; it is thus natural that in the field of art, vision is the faculty most commonly used to discriminate the beautiful from the non-beautiful, the true from the untrue, the real from the constructed. And it is by means of the gaze that the viewer’s mind traces an opinion about that which is being presented as art. 

We apprehend the objects that surround us as we see them – and the constant repetition of this apprehension allows us to place them in their proper context. The works gathered here present situations which cloud our visual memory and its entrenched expectations, at once reiterating and distorting our certainties with respect to the matter that constructs our experience, its function and its place in the world. 

Sempre à Vista (Miragem) presents works which concentrate their force in the simplicity and precision and economy of their construction. The works draw on the repertoire of ordinary images and objects, coaxing them out of routine and submitting them to the viewer’s consideration as art. ” – Rodrigo Matheus

The stillness and unconventional hanging of the works united in the exhibition prompt the viewer to consider the nature of the space itself – in this case, one with domestic and historical elements that has been adapted in order become a formal gallery space.

Sempre à Vista (Miragem) advances a body of works which at once reveal and conceal their problematic; and are dissimulating as to their function. They prompt the viewer to consciously relive the daily experience of visual apprehension (and expectation) taking for his point of departure the mirage – a deceptive double of the real world which casts a shadow on our most fundamental certainties of the visual.