BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Gabriel Centurion’s Kitsch Cave

  The first thing to clarify, putting it in simple terms, as a text about art should be, is the word Kitsch. The word is widely used today to define everything that is in questionable taste. However, the Kitsch Cave, title of the paintings and video exhibition held at the Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro, is not about questionable taste.

   The term originated in Germany in the late nineteenth century to describe artists’ and art collectors’ bad taste in art. More recently, the word became more broadly used, and is used to describe people and the things they exaggerate in their behavior, in how they dress, in the home decor, in the shape of things, in the colors, or even everything that goes beyond normal behavior and aesthetics. Also, something that rings false and contrary to innovation. Even political art that, for the American professor Camille Paglia (Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars), when it is low quality, is also kitsch.

  In art, it would be everything that is opposite to what is considered tasteful, serious, modern art, and what is understood as contemporary art - art linked to innovation. But there is no rule for that. A kitsch object to some people can be something beautiful and sophisticated to others. This taste is according to who we are, our educational and cultural background, the community we live in and so on. Folk art and art for the masses would be kitsch too, following this logic of “sophisticated taste.” Although they are increasingly present in exhibitions where they are displayed side by side with modern and contemporary art. Breaking taboos and hierarchies.

  To illustrate, there are artists like the American Jeff Koons, likened by critics, market and institutions, to sophisticated kitsch, which would be at one end of what is still accepted as art. On the other end, Brazilian artist Romero Britto, who is not accepted by critics and institutions. But to some people, Britto makes art too. To others, it is nothing, it is something merely kitsch.

  This decision and definition of good and bad taste is very relative. Both artists mentioned here, we could claim, do the same thing: "kitsch art" or extravagant art. The first intentionally to shock, and the latter unconsciously to please.

  Whereas Centurion quotes this "kitsch art" in the way he paints and in the topics he addresses in his figurative paintings. But I doubt if what he proposes would, in fact, fit in the Kitsch category.

  What one sees in his paintings is humor, oddness in the portrayed situations, and the intensive use of pink in his paintings and installation. It is an exploration of his universe in his paintings and in the way he presents them, sincere and over-the-top.

  The exhibition was designed specifically for the rooms at this cultural center, occupying them as a large installation. One could say that it was a site-specific work; thus, an artwork that is created to be where it is presented. The painting comes out of the canvas and expands to the walls and blends with a video projection in which the artist’s themes and issues turn the artwork into a large cave. With walls lined by lavish pink curtains.

  And that is how his exhibition title came to be, Kitsch Cave. The public enters this "cave" and becomes part of this large painting and projection. It is as if we were swallowed by the pictorial mass that we see in the installation and that spreads through the exhibition rooms. As  we move we become a part of what is in front of us, on our side or behind us. Everything that surrounds us.

  Gabriel Centurion’s paintings portray his universe with exaggerated colors, brushstrokes and furnishings that reinforce the idea of an over-the-top cave.

  The artist admits he likes everything Kitsch and he uses this "style" to transform his and our reality, articulate our emotions in the exhibition space. By going over the top with the colors and portraying trite characters in surreal situations, the artist forces us to review our own concepts of what would be the so-called "normal" things.

  We are exposed to situations that we find odd, such as the man in front of a microphone with his head shaped as a sheep's body. Further on, a woman's body wearing a paper bag over her head. Yet another body beside her, apparently a woman cut at the chest, as if the painting had not been completed. They are not on the floor, they float on the canvas. It is as if they are on another plane. The clothing of the man with the sheep head stands out. A strong blue suit that contrasts with the pink tones of the environment and the skin of exposed flesh. Environment and figures have the same hue, rosy. The paint drips. Looks like it was not finished, looks like a bad painting.

  The way Gabriel Centurion paints results in a "bad" painting, which does not seek perfection of the figure, but is careful and takes a long time to realize. A painting intentionally painted to look like a bad painting is a trait that artists from the 1980s relied on after “the painting lost its glamour” in the 1960s and 1970s. Before that, the painting ruled over all other languages (Arthur C. Danto, in What Art Is?). More recently, the painting returned strongly, but amassed with other combinations, with video, cinema, sculpture, photography, performance and installation.

  In this exhibition, Gabriel Centurion mixes his artwork with painting directly on the wall, video and installation. It is a believable and unintelligible world at the same time. They are paintings that flirt with the far-fetched and the surreal.

  Somehow, in his manner of painting, acrylic paint brings planning to the painting, where the brushstroke disappears in its intensity. In its fast-drying and low elasticity composition, unlike oil paint, the result when one does not want to have complete mastery of the technique of painting with acrylic, is a painting that looks like it was poorly made. Which is not to say that this painting has poor quality. On the contrary. From what we saw from German painting from the 1980s and from the '80s Generation, as the artists of that decade were called, bad painting was a quality to strive for. They experienced a detachment from the painting techniques that prevailed in modern painting.

  The brushstroke does not perfectly delineate the figures. The figures that we see so little of, are shapely and proportional. What we also see from this figure is something odd. Abnormal situations. The perspective does not follow its angulation either. The environments are destabilized. There is no proportion. Heads are replaced with animal bodies, bags or covered with masks. Bodies are unfinished and result in bizarre situations.

  The universe portrayed in Gabriel Centurion’s paintings, in general, are pictures shared on the internet and transferred to canvas or painted directly on the wall. By taking on these images in a random, fragmented, anonymous process, the artist decontextualizes them.

  He creates unusual, odd and distorted figuration situations. The results are paintings that depict unreal, far-fetched and unimaginable conditions of everyday life, such as the one that shows a man holding a bird under his arm. The bird is “stiff,” the man is out of proportion. The bird is the one that stares at us as the man is about to push a button on a door. An elevator door? That is not clear. The vanishing lines do not follow a rule. But the amazing thing is when we realize that the man is disproportionately on the bottom, from where we see the bird. We find out that the man has four legs. Four feet wearing the same shoe.

  In another painting we see a man in a relaxed position (slouching) sitting on a pink couch with two poodles with the same color coat. In a conversation, the artist – good-humoredly – “admitted” that this is his favorite color. A color associated with the feminine universe. Even so, going against the men and women rules, he still says that pink is his color. In this painting we can also see green pillows that contrast with the reddish color. The three figures wear cone-shaped hats, like those we see in children's parties. What is this situation presented by the artist? This dog breed is often associated with the Kitsch universe. Filled with pompom. As if that haircut was not enough, what we saw in a recent fad were these dogs’ owners dyeing the hair according to their taste. Yellow, blue, purple, pink...

  In his paintings altogether, although there is a lot of humor, melancholy seems to dominate the characters that express a deflated and saddened human condition. But this is just one reading of an experimental exhibition, where one is not quite sure of what is going on.

  Spaces like this at Caixa Cultural, porous and permeable, allow the artist to move away from commercial art without the commitment to buy and sell, and, independently, experiment with artistic languages, bringing art closer to the public, placing them as the protagonist of his painting. That is what Gabriel Centurion proposes in his Kitsch Cave exhibition.

  Ricardo Resende

  Curator

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  Gabriel Centurion | Graffit in a bit cave
  
  Semionaut sailing through an ocean of endless data, Gabriel Centurion collects signs and image formation processes related to graffiti technic. The artist gives an oriental twist to street art aesthetics, not only by using themes such as the Transformers but also given his special conception.   His artworks stay between Japanese prints and videographic collages – a multi-layered composition of images and registers that creates image thickness –, that is, when they are not videos. Interesting enough, the matrix of its printing technique is, in general, an image accessed from the internet and imprinted on wood or wall, with the help of a projector, as if in an inversion of the Renaissance camera obscura or in an immaterial stencil. From the internet to the wall or frame, the image is applied with a felt tip pen? and spray, in a palette of citrus shades and acrylic mixed by the artist himself. The matrix used, ironically, is already a reproduced picture, which he appropriated?. But for this graffiti artist of the kitsch cave of bits, which is the contemporary world of 3D and Virtual Reality images, the photographic realism is undone in an evanescent appearance, ghostly, on a dripping background. He unmakes the hyper-realistic simulacrum – in which the image substitutes the reality within its own reality -, into a hyper-de-realization? that fragments and mutilates. Symptom of a world of over-culture, increasingly digitized, which may contain it all, but also from where everything can disappear, his artwork conceives the space as means, volatile and liquid, which lasts only for the present time. ?? From the swift inscription, which reduces the risk in prohibited places, and on different surfaces, what may come up instead of the image that the contemporary world makes of itself is the image that he projects.
  Pooh bears, bunnies and children's characters erupt, perverse, hooded, in a Freudian slip, amid Japanese S&M binding, an anamorphic revelation of the fetish, a renewable energy source that runs under the globalized culture of global capitalism.
  
  Fernando Gerheim