Frida Baranek (Rio de Janeiro, 1961) is a sculptor whose career began in the early 1980s, in a generation that brought back the integrity and power of traditional artistic disciplines.

With training in architecture and sculpture, Baranek’s works vary between small- and large-scale pieces, the use of industrial materials and more delicate materials such as paper, textiles or vegetable pigments.

The works showcased in this exhibition are divided into two groups: floor pieces and wall pieces. These medium-scale pieces bring together different materials: glass and wood or iron, wood, and acrylic; stone (marble or alabaster), stainless steel tubing and wire, respectively.

While the wall pieces exist in a sort of ambiguous condition between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, the ones placed on the floor (which, by force of gravity, are immediately identified as sculptures), constitute a vocabulary of shapes that relate to each other through games of variations and random combinations, alternating almost musically between rhythms and dynamics.

In a way, all the pieces ask viewers to mould themselves to the poetics of the materials, whether manufactured or harvested, borrowed from Nature. Our fascination for the shapes, colours and patterns of certain stones or the veins of certain woods is timeless. No less fascinating is the transparency of glass or materials such as acrylic or Perspex, which carry with them the property of allowing themselves to be traversed by the gaze and of stimulating the viewer’s imagination.

To quote Roger Caillois, a poet and an inveterate stone collector, “for me, imagination is nothing more than an extension of matter. I think that poetry is not a purely human phenomenon, nor solely a phenomenon of language. If I only concern myself with describing stones right now, it is to show that within these stones, and in the way they find their form, there are instances of reduction, of miniaturisation, of all things that exist in the world.”

Nuno Faria, Curator