Details of some works showed in the exhibition Sweet Brutalities at Museu de Arte Contemporânea Casa das Onze Janelas. July and August 2021, Belém-PA, Brazil
By exploring different artistic expressions, Henrique Montanha takes a risk towards a broad possibility of languages that, when observed together, can be understood as an unusual visual poetics, whose central issue is the approaches to the body, its identities and subjectivations, but not just that. We can see an explanation of a distressing generalized loneliness so inseparable from consumer societies and their technologies, where the very relationships are crossed by the capitalist logic of ephemeral, disposable pleasures, fleeting experiences, momentary affections, fleeting loves.
The artist directs us to different versions of himself, sometimes presenting fictionalized autobiographies, sometimes allegorical representations of trustworthy or imagined intimate desires, which confirm and, at the same time, denounce such flagrant symbolic constructions in a cysheterocentric and masculinist culture.
Through the intersection of performance, video, photography, painting, drawing, installation, object and writing, “Sweet Brutalities” brings to light the way in which globalization produces and subjects the configuration of what we understand as masculine through a wide circulation of images of bodies and models of masculinities in a cybernetic age, commenting on the massively diffused, codified and incorporated physical archetypes, as well as the inevitable disillusionment resulting from the excessive demands imposed by the fanciful hegemonic constructs in their government practices on the bodies. After all, the semantics of violence structures the imagination about masculinity not only by the diffusion of virile bodies associated with absolute vigor, but also by the frustration it generates even in individuals who inhabit the place of masculinity, because it is utopian, and no one fulfills it in its entirety.
And even though the hyper-exposure of desires imprisoned to the constructions admitted in a culture disciplined by corporeal conventions is blatant, they are not submissive to the moralities so typical of a power willing to censor everything that does not fit its very castrating rules.
“Sweet Brutalities” proposes an uninterrupted tension, a constant short-circuit between analogue and digital technology, between the revival and the current, between the tactile/feasible and the virtual, between tenderness, delicacy, and violence.
Tales Frey
Curator
Parallel Program of the exhibition Sweet Brutalities
6 August 2021 | Live Body of Place Not Place, with Tales Frey and Henrique Montanha. Mediation by Armando Sobral. YouTube da Secult Pará.
CREDITS
Henrique Montanha: Sweet Brutalities | Curator: Tales Frey | Museu de Arte Contemporânea Casa das Onze Janelas. Belém-PA, Brazil | 15 July to 30 August 2021
Clipping
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Details of some works showed in the exhibition Sweet Brutalities at Museu de Arte Contemporânea Casa das Onze Janelas. July and August 2021, Belém-PA, Brazil