Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Silhouettes Parfaites (Perfect Silhouettes), Nú Barreto's fourth solo exhibition, across the Paris and Brussels galleries.
Works on recycled paper offer spaces of circulation where beings and things, swept up into a disconcerting mobility, find themselves and shift around, sometimes going beyond the structural limits imposed by the frame.
At the heart of the exhibition is a three-meter-long canvas mounted on wood. Titled Transmissions (2022), it is a continuation of his series Etats Désunis d'Afrique (2009), in which the configuration of the American flag is replaced by the colors of most African states. Pens are amassed along the entire length of the canvas, as if to signify the accumulations of ideas, knowledge and desires.
This new body of work is an extension of the artist's research-Nú Barreto's use of drawing as a means of expression-and reveals works that have never been seen before. For this new exhibition, the plasticity of each work is enriched by variations in material and volumes, conveying politically charged messages on the state of the contemporary art world.
Since childhood, drawing has always been the artist's preferred medium: it is the "place of all expression," allowing to drastically reduce discourse via an "iconography that facilitates reading and transmission," he declares. Initially two-dimensional, Nú Barreto's practice has gradually shifted towards a plastic approach, where collages and the interplay of materials and volumes are central. These forms, which can be mistaken for abstractions, in reality reproduce silhouettes: "silhouettes like shadows," says the artist, "shadows like traces, traces like gestural imprints or frozen acts in which their agitation seems to dictate, lightly or dangerously, a narration of concrete facts," he continues.
Alone or entwined, these shadows of moving figures are at times physically very close to us. Their arrangement on the flat surface, either right side up, or upside down, creates unbalanced environments. The contours of each shape float in the pictorial field, sometimes transcending it: the silhouettes escape from the frame with their lively mobility or come towards us in their three-dimensionality, significantly detaching themselves from the support of the work. Visitors thus experience materiality in this face-to-face encounter with the works, contemplating the variations in scale, size and volume of the cut-out silhouettes.
Nú Barreto’s iconography, rich and symbolic, subsists in this new corpus. The motifs echo each other from one work to another: bottles containing people and objects, three-legged chairs and ladders with uneven rungs follow each other like a series of words turned into images. To complete his personal semantics, the artist uses a chromatic palette where the color red acts as a binder. Red continues to be chosen for its symbolic power. Through image and color, Nú Barreto's new language attempts to express the instability and violence of the world in the 21st century.
By focusing on the human condition and the excesses of power in our contemporary society, Nú Barreto's works recall the drawings of South African artist William Kentridge. In these settings where circulation is the order of the day, visitors enter and circulate through the image. They scan the layers of material, volumes and symbols that transmit a message. For it is truly transmission that lies at the heart of this exhibition: all the symbolic and pictorial resources overflow in their vivid expressivity, escaping the frame both in their mobility and in their volume. These accumulations represent tormented landscapes, mirrors of the troubled state of the world.
