Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira’s mind-bending artwork doesn’t fit into the genre of “street art” – yet the material he uses does come from the streets.
From early on Oliveira experimented with the surfaces of his paintings: he began by gluing newspaper onto a canvas and scraping it as well as mixing sand with paint. He was looking for ways to bring more texture to paintings. A breakthrough occurred while he was a student at the University of São Paulo: for two straight years, the view from his studio window was a wooden construction fence (tapume, in Portuguese). Over time, Oliveira began noticing the deterioration of the wood and its separation into multiple layers and colors, and related that to the process of painting. When the construction was finished and the worn out plywood fence was discarded, Oliveira collected the wood and used it in his first installation.
His installations have evolved into massive constructions that he calls “tri-dimensional” due to the combination of painting, architecture and sculpture. To bring his pieces to life, he sometimes uses PVC tubes to create gigantic protruding forms over which he layers thin sheets of wood while; other times, thousands of pieces of painted wood are arranged into gestural abstract “paintings” that spill off the wall into the viewer’s space.
Though he now incorporates new, flexible plywood into his work, his primary material remains the discarded wood collected on the streets of São Paulo. Henrique Oliveira’s “tri-dimensional” installations will be exhibited at the Rice Gallery in Houston, Texas between March 26th and May 9th, 2009.
[via Fabrik Project]
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