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A conceptual fable

One of the latent questions in the work of Milton Machado is the search for connections between apparently unrelated objects. This exhibition at Galeria Nara Roesler gathers installations, videos, objects and photos, such as an sculpture made with stacked steel cabinets, images of a industrial painting chamber and the gallery collection itself. Milton Machado shifts objects and images from the industrial realm to the exhibition gallery, and stores the works of the gallery collection as if they were pieces of an industrial assembly line. Besides this inversion of the object status, a Duchampian notion seminal in conceptual art of which Machado is adept, this set of works surprises also by its provoking constructions, loaded with aesthetic power.

"This exhibition has the undisguisable aspect of a visual fable: Milton Machado's intelligence penetrated the steel furniture industry with the appetite of a child invading a chocolate factory. And could we, for example, call the (perhaps nameless?) character of this fable Painting?" asks Paulo Venâncio Filho. According to the art critic, there is no painting in this show "but if I call the character of this fable Painting it is, first and foremost, due to the clear visual appeal that the elements of the work bring about, and also due to the evident succession of allegories that they provoke in relation to painting."

When Milton Machado was in an industry seeking for one of the ready-made objects he uses in his work, he found the painting chamber for steel furniture. According to Paulo Venâncio Filho, the artist encountered there no more, no less than the 'production of painting'. "It is there that Milton somewhat offers a glimpse and reveals the pictorial dealienation of industrial materials". In the same manners that, says the critic, also in this show, the artist performs the plastic/spatial dealienation of the gallery's technical reserve, by shifting it to the center of the room and of the exhibition. "Indeed, what the exhibition presents is not 'painting' in the form of the painted object, but the very production of an experience of painting which instigates and provokes painting within us, the spectators", Venâncio concludes.

Milton Machado graduated in architecture at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro -UFRJ. He holds a master's degree in urban planning from the same university and a PhD degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His first solo show was at Galeria Maison de France in 1975, after his participation in the X International Biennial of São Paulo, 1969, with a group work granted the silver medal in the International Contest of Architecture Schools. In 1987 he showed again at the Biennial of São Paulo (XIX) and, since the 1970s, has had solo and group shows in Brazil and abroad. His previous solo show in São Paulo took place in 2005, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake.