KUNSTHALE Sao Paulo proudly invites Portuguese artist Tiago Mestre to present the work in progress All the things you are, in which he develops 21 sculptures in 21 days.
The project consists of the construction of a narrative in which the disappearance of the earlier work is a sine qua non condition for the emergence of later. In this passionate exercise, the artist is confronted every day with the art work in an attempt to detach himself from whatever has been constructed in order to think of new possibilities, new spiritual state, in a plastic, circular and inevitably inconclusive game.
If in Benjamin’s theory the aura of the artwork has its origin in the idea of the religious ritual, placing it as an object to be worshiped, Tiago Mestre questions this very auratic value of the artwork as the final state of the creative process, and transfers it to the process itself, to the daily ritual of making and unmaking, of trying, failing and achieving. Hence, the artist also questions the market value of the art object, the fetishism that reifies the artwork and renders its auratic value into a market value. In All the things you are the fetishism turns to the process, to the daily performance of the artist in the exhibition space, whose record will be presented at the closing event of the work .
The project’s title – inspired by an interpretation of this music by Django Reinhardt – suggests three starting points for reading Mestre’s work: all, an attempt to include a whole territory, a complete and multifaceted portrait; things, the reification process of the mental universe of the artist, a mapping of the states of the person; and finally you are, the inclusion of the viewer into the narrative of the process. Thus, the artist creates a metaphor of the human condition, with which he reflects on the succession of the days (time), and on how the same matter allows to build different ideas, enables different things, but inhabits the world in a precarious, finite and transient way.
