Fernando Mello Brum
Event Horizon

3+1 Arte Contemporânea is pleased to announce Event Horizon, Fernando Mello Brum’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1989) first exhibition at the gallery.

Fernando Mello Brum’s paintings result from a careful observation of daily life; however, they do not represent an objective reality, incentivizing a subjective and poetic understanding of the landscape. His work explores inherent questions to painting itself, like chromatic balance, materiality and layering, in apparently spontaneous games of colours that are, in truth, studied and rational.

Event Horizon brings together works on canvas and on paper and it is the culmination of various themes and ideas, from astrophysics, literature and poetry, that have occupied the artist’s mind during the past year. The title of the exhibition is based on the phenomenon that defines the theoretical boundary of a black hole, beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull. This is a concept that is particularly interesting to the artist, not only from a physics standpoint, but also metaphoric, as he uses it to describe the invisible, inaudible and ineffable elements of artistic practice.

The works on display are – as the artist describes them – fragmented landscapes that do not seek to represent but rather to create tension and displacement, in an approach to the concept of ostranenie – defamiliarization or estrangement, coined by Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky – which forces the observer to see something from a new perspective by presenting something familiar in an unusual way. The gaze is diverted and its focus stops being the image but the intentionality of the gestures, of the colours, of the empty spaces. There are no coincidences in Mello Brum’s compositions: even the strange is planned.