Jaqueline Martins Gallery São Paulo, Brazil

infrastructure, institution, individual
19 August - 21 October 2023

infrastructure, institution, individual, Daniel de Paula's second solo exhibition at Galeria Jaqueline Martins, updates and continues the conceptual artist's critical investigations into the violent social relations that dominate us and also transform the space around us by satisfying the needs of a modern capitalist society: producing and exchanging commodities.

Through a rigorous juxtaposition of immaterial objects, texts and procedures, and informed by a self-critical stance, de Paula reveals the intertwining between her own artistic production, the commercial context of Galeria Jaqueline Martins and the arrangement of a vast global infrastructural space ; all parties —even if asymmetrical— involved in the social, political, economic and environmental catastrophes resulting from the competitive logic of value production within capitalist sociability.

In infrastructure, institution, individual, Daniel de Paula presents a diverse lexicon of materialities and processes created over the last few years, in which the artist was highlighted in relevant exhibitions on the global cultural circuit in institutions such as: Bienal de São Paulo, Lyon Biennale, The Renaissance Society of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, The Arts Club of Chicago, Kunsthal Gent, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea di Milano, among others.

Among the works developed for infrastructure, institution, individual, the artist presents — through a dialectical relationship between appearance and essence, light and shadow, physicality and actions — a bureaucratic intervention on the gallery's light supply system, objects from auctions of unusable materials from energy generation and urban mobility companies, graphic paintings impregnated with cadaveric odor used in the training of sniffer dogs in the context of infrastructural disasters and also legal contracts for the purchase and sale of shadows of objects and people.

de Paula points to the latent contradictions that reside between the means and intentions in the artistic creation that is part of a mercantile system —which end up reproducing the ideologies of capital, property, work and value— and asks urgent questions about the fetishistic character of art, questioning the positive perception of the artistic field as autonomous, supposedly disentangled, and merely representative of a world in crisis; thus suggesting a conscious posture as a starting point for a critical discussion of the present time.

Jaqueline Martins Gallery
Rua Dr. Cesário Mota Junior, 443.
Sao Paulo/SP, Brazil
Visitation: Tuesday to Friday, from 10 am to 7 pm. Saturdays, from 12 pm to 5 pm

Galeriajaquelinemartins.com.br