Exhibition INDEXXX (2022), by Tales Frey. Ocupa Gallery, Porto, Portugal. Promotional video for social networks
In the window of Ocupa Gallery, there is an attractive finger. He points while turning, has red fingernails and testicles. In a cadenced vertigo, the object rotates and makes us lose ourselves in thoughts: what body network does Tales Frey signal at the entrance to the INDEXXX exhibition?
It is necessary to be inside the gallery to inhabit a kind of playful program that speaks directly to the body: our concreteness, proof of the “real”, is seen quartered, multiplied, hybridized, illuminated, dressed, stretched, entertained, televised.
We enjoy an expanded reality, in which each element of this game for adults tensions something familiar and strange, always to the extent of risking a good meeting with the public.
Laughing, wishing, alluding, confusing is also a form of involvement with the new and, perhaps, Frey is firm in the task of sharing his strategies to free himself from that normative version, constrained by contemporary life.
“INDEXXX” is also an environmental aesthetic heir to current and nostalgic forms of a certain visual culture of the variety show, the music video, internet memes, the illuminated signs of any film in a dark Shanghai.
But, instead of the artist working for the cult of celebrity, of consumption dreams, of the validation of the “I” in social networks, he experiments with means for these devices of communication on a planetary scale to bend to a new order, an “almost – cinema” of those who have a taste for pain and the delight of being a tropical artist.
The finger points, the triad of backlights show the ABC of the ideographs-dicks, televisions broadcast artistic gymnastics, photos print on the walls, a dressing room is arranged right there where the meats of the butcher shop, now deactivated and which is now an art gallery, were hung. There are many discoveries in this exhibition.
Grasiele Sousa a.k.a Cabelódroma
ARTWORKS
1) Tales Frey, Forefinger, 2022. Kinetic pvc object with acrylic paint and rotating motor, 50 x 30 x 10 cm;
2) Tales Frey, Double Penetration, 2021. Wooden crates with light and acrylic, 120 x 10 x 15 cm each;
3) Tales Frey, XXL Lag With Single Foot – Manipulation I and II, 2021. Video, 04’21;
4) Tales Frey, The Body Never Exists In Itself, 2018. Photographs, 20 x 20 cm each;
5) Tales Frey, Xuxona, 2022. Sculpture composed of papier-mâché, wig and padded elastics, 180 x 40 cm.
Parallel Program
April 30, 2022 at 3 pm
CREDITS
Tales Frey: INDEXXX | Ocupa Gallery, Porto, Portugal | Critical essay: Grasiele Sousa | Graphic design: ¼ Studio | Gallery management: Alexandre Teixeira | Acknowledgmentst: Hilda de Paulo, Leika Morishita e Tânia Dinis | Supports: Escola Superior de Educação Politécnico do Porto and Criatório | April 16 to May 7, 2022