Eduardo Padilha
Padrões, tapetes e estruturas domésticas (Patterns, carpets and domestic structures), 2008, by Eduardo Padilha
Padrões, tapetes e estruturas domésticas (Patterns, carpets and domestic structures) is a mixture of intervention and installation (intervinstalação), created for the exhibition hall of the Lagos Cultural Center. This Portuguese word (intervinstalação) was invented to suggest the unique juxtaposition of intervention and installation in the exhibition area of the rooms and passageways of the building. In material terms, the work is based on a trilogy of alternative domestic economies. The patterns – used as recurrent multicolored rhythmical structures – are the result of local ornamental-functional iconography and can be read both as action-painting or as graffiti, binding art history references to street painting. The carpets and domestic structures are objects that have been found on the street or purchased at discount markets, the so-called one-pound shops. These objects sum up references to intimate spaces and to alternative economies that subsist in the interstice of international monetary operations. The use of metallic painting on the surface of the objects is a camouflage operation in order to imprint on the objects a new economic identity, as pieces of art that are to be found in the market of contemporary art.(pr)
EDUARDO PADILHA was born in Sant’Ana do Livramento (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), in 1964, and lives and works in London and Amsterdam. He graduated with an from the Chelsea College of Art & Design (London, 1997) after studying at the Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, 1993) in a Gerriet Rietveld Academy exchange programme, where he obtained his BA in Arts (Amsterdam, 1995). He has exhibited his work at the Traders Pop Gallery in Maastrich, Holland, in the solo exhibitions Viva lost Vagueness! (2004) and Strange Man for Strange Times (2002). At the International Institute for Visual Arts (inIVA) he has developed a three months residency project, which ended up as an Open Studio (London, 2000). His group exhibitions, include: the project Full Circle, in collaboration with Michael Schwab, consisting of two exhibitions, one at the Huisrecht Project Space (Amsterdam, 2007) and the other one at the Studio 1.1 (London, 2008), a workshop at the Gasworks Gallery (London), as well as a publication and a website. The other is One Thing Against Another, an intervention in the public space in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, in 2008, a project curated by Oliver Sunmer from the Aspex Gallery. He also runs a curatorial project in his London home called Balin House Projects, which consists in an exhibition space and artists’ exchange program, with the support of the Southwark Council.