Leda Catunda and Alcides
Galeria Estação has already successfully partnered with other galleries and some of its contemporary artists.
This time we joined Fortes, D’Aloia & Gabriel gallery for a dialogue between the artist Leda Catunda and the late painter Alcides. The choice was made by Leda herself, who, when visiting us, and among several artists, made her choice.
Leda, an artist committed to the contemporary world, also has a language that I can recognize as close to that of the so-called popular artists. She makes use of the colors, the elements she has at hand, with seriousness and good humor. I did not know very well what would appear in this dialogue, but I did trust. When she invited me to go to her studio to see the works, I rejoiced! I entered and saw, immediately, the interaction between them. Leda uses varied supports, as always happens in her work. Collage, drawing, engraving.
Alcides, who I knew well, used acrylic on canvas. We spent a lot of time together from 1999 on, when he left Mato Grosso to join his daughter in São Paulo. Here, stranger in a strange land, he spent some time painting still on Mato Grosso state. But I felt that the memory betrayed him and he was a little indecisive between the theme of there and the one of his new city. He gradually reasserted himself and began to paint what, perhaps, had impressed him the most in the big city. Airplanes, motorcycles, trucks, boats, on and of returning to the subject of Mato Grosso pastures.
Alcides passed away in 2007, three days after the opening of his first individual at Galeria Estação, leaving a vibrant and consistent work.
The meeting of these two creators, therefore, could only result in this beautiful show.
I’m very excited!
Vilma Eid

Leda Catunda e Alcides | Where we are and where we are going Curated by Leda Catunda Opening: June 14 at 7:00 p.m. Visitation until Aug 14, 2018 Monday to Friday, from 11am to 7pm, Saturdays from 11am to 3pm - free admission.

Where we are and where we are going
Clearly fascinated by the idea of progress, Alcides Pereira dos Santos, born in 1932 in the city of Rui Barbosa in the interior of Bahia, collected in his works images that reflect his charm for the good things associated with the idea of technological advancement. Among paintings of landscapes and plantations and others representing factories, there is a whole series dedicated to means of transportation.
Alcides, only Alcides, as he came to be known as an artist, painted several models of cars, motorcycles, boats and aircraft. Always on rectangular canvases of medium size, measuring about one meter high by one and a half meters long. This curious scale of large rectangles served enough to accommodate the design of the vehicle in question, whose figure extended to all four sides of the canvas, bordering the edges, taking advantage of the maximum limit of space. Besides the extremely detailed figure inspired by the language of technical drawings, but with invented proportions and intense colors, there is also the colored background. In these paintings of vehicles the ease and expressiveness of the gestures that make up this background contrast with the precision of the straight lines that construct the figures of the motorcycle, the car, the helicopter. The backgrounds are filled with dotted elements that suggest reticles, such as those in the pop paintings of Claudio Tozzi, Roy Lichtenstein or even Sigmar Polke, the latter having once declared about this symbol of graphic modernity: “I love reticle, I am a reticle!”
Having lived through the twentieth century, he witnessed relevant facts from our recent history, which, through ingenious technologies, pointed to a promising and fascinating future. He witnessed the appearance of several car models in the country, with the strengthening of the automobile industry under the Juscelino Kubitschek administration in the 1950s, as well as the launches of white and gleaming American rockets from the Apollo mission on the man’s journey to the moon in the late 1960s. As well as having lived with all the mythology surrounding the submarines, popularized within the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain in the post-World War II or even in TV series as Voyage to the bottom of the sea.
Parallel to the paintings of locomotion vehicles, there are, in the set of his works, images representing places such as houses, squares, gardens and plantations, which form a moving portrait of the country he knew. In addition to Bahia where he was born and raised, he also lived in Rondonópolis in 1950 and then moved to Cuiabá in 1976, where he attended the Atelier Livre of the Cultural Foundation of Mato Grosso, and finally moved to São Paulo in the 1990s. In the same prism of futuristic wonder, he painted incredible factory buildings, equally filled with details of machinery, chimneys, and smoke. His poetics seems to revolve around the desire for an organized world, surely compartmentalized into categories involving leisure vehicles, war vehicles, plantations, and industries.
I share a special affection for the organization of the things of life that I seek to represent in my work by choosing archetypal images such as the road, the mountain, the house and the pond. Images of drops, waterfalls, cats and other animals are derived from the same repertoire as symbols of the times in which we live, based on the same mythology of progress and a supposed comfort that should result from the effort to reasonably order existence. A comfortable world of mountainous landscapes with curving roads, lakes and pebbles. I have always loved cars and, like many of my generation, grew up watching the Formula 1 races, following and cheering for the heroes Emerson, Nelson and Ayrton. Thus, I developed a special taste for the racing circuit drawings and the sophisticated and colorful soil paintings that serve as signage. Thinking of the Alcides vehicles, I made Track I and Track 2, wood-cut object paintings with paved roads for cars, motorcycles and trucks and with rivers and lakes for boats, ferries and submarines.
Roads, vehicles, and travel suggest a metaphorical idea of change. Shifting from one point to another, moving from one situation to another, a new one. Thus, we can think that Alcides, who was a bricklayer, wall painter, barber and cobbler, has achieved through his art a new place. Synthesizing dream and desire in the images he produced, he changed his world in his own way, generously sharing his art with us all.
Leda Catunda, 2018

Galeria Estação
Presents
Leda Catunda and Alcides: where we are and where we are going
Opening: June 14, at 7pm
Visitation until Aug 14, 2018
Besides critics, Galeria Estação has been inviting artists to curate the exhibitions of its collection, such as Paulo Pasta (José Antonio da Silva and Julio Martins da Silva) and Rodrigo Bivar (Neves Torres and Manuel Graciano). This time, the gallery has invited Leda Catunda and has proposed a new model: the artist-curator chooses a cast name from the gallery to dialogue with her own production. In this context “Leda Catunda and Alcides: where we are and where we go”, shows around 30 works of this double of artists.
As Leda points out, Alcides (1932, Rui Barbosa - BA / 2007, São Paulo - SP) sought to represent his time and place. The artist watched the development of the automobile industry, the launching of rockets, as the remarkable journey of man to the moon, and the mysteries that surrounded the Cold War submarines. When he lived in the state of Mato Grosso he created images of houses, squares, gardens, plantations and animals. When moving to São Paulo in the 90’s, his original geometry painting began to portray models of cars, motorcycles, boats, aircraft, factories and urban landscapes.
For the curator artist, just as Alcides’s poetics seems to revolve around the desire for an organized world, compartmentalized into categories, she nurtures a special affection for the organization of things in life. “I seek to represent the things of life in my work, choosing archetypal images such as the road, the mountain, the house and the pond, besides waterfalls and animals, as symbols of the times in which we live, based on the same mythology of progress and a supposed comfort that should result from the effort to reasonably order the existence.”
Leda also shares Alcides’ fascination with vehicles, as she belongs to a generation charmed by cars, a feeling stimulated by the races and heroes of the Formula1. According to the artist, it was from there that she developed a special taste for the racing circuit drawings and their sophisticated and colorful ground paintings that serve as signage. Thinking of Alcides’ vehicles, Leda designed for this exhibition “Track I” and “Track 2”, object paintings cut out of wood with paved roads for cars, motorcycles and trucks and with rivers and lakes for boats, ferries and submarines.
“Roads, vehicles, and travel suggest a metaphorical suggestion of change. Moving from one point to another, moving from one situation to another. So we can think that Alcides, who was a bricklayer, wall painter, barber and cobbler, reached through his art a new place. Synthesizing dream and desire in the images he produced, he changed his world in his own way,” adds Leda.

About Galeria Estação
With a collection among the pioneers and most important of the country, Galeria Estação, opened at the end of 2004 devoted to reveal and promote the production of non erudite Brazilian art. This performance was decisive for the inclusion of this language in the contemporary artistic circuit, when editing publications and holding individual and collective exhibitions under the watch of the main curators and critics of the country. The cast, which has come to occupy space in the specialized media, is still winning the international scene, by participating, among others, in the exhibitions “Histoire de Voir” at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (France) in 2012 and Bienal “Between Two Mares - São Paulo | Valencia,” in Spain in 2007. Emblematic of this international performance was the individual exhibition of Veio-Cícero Alves dos Santos, in Venice, in parallel to the Biennial of Arts, in 2013. In Brazil, in addition to solo exhibitions and integrating prestigious group shows, the artists featured by the gallery have their works in important Brazilian collections and leading institutions, such as: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Afro Brazil Museum in São Paulo, Pavilhão das Culturas Brasileiras in São Paulo, MAM- Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and the MAR in Rio de Janeiro.

Exhibition:
Leda Catunda and Alcides: where we are and where we are going.
Opening: June 14 at 7pm
Visitation until Aug 14, 2018
From Monday to Friday, from 11am to 7pm, Saturdays from 11am to 3pm – free admission.
Galeria EStação
Rua Ferreira de Araújo, 625 – Pinheiros – SP
Phone: 55 11.3813-7253
www.galeriaestacao.com.br
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