Nuno Faria Desafios / Defiances [...]

Among the many reinventions of modernity lies the fact that we have gradually shifted the place and state of social relations. If in the Middle Ages the aim was to endure and establish fixed and immutable bonds, in contemporary times displace-ment and malleability [...]

Always on the move, Frida Baranek’s trajectory in the past few decades has been marked by the journey itself rather than by any specific destination. Dislocating between Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paris, Berlin, New York, and London, she is currently based in Miami, on her way to Lisbon. Her peripatetic path has been touched by the intensity of her encounters and unforeseen situations as she seeks out, welcomes, and embraces new possibilities and challenges.

Liminaridade 2019 [Liminality]

The borders between materials and those related to sculpture and their surroundings are some of the central interests in the new series of works by Frida Baranek. This equation between matter and space is inherent to sculpture in its historical perspective; from antiquity to the ephemerality of the installations made in the last fifty years, showing a three-dimensional art object has always been configured as a tensioning between scales, colors and materialities. [...]

Art Nexus (Outubro 2017)

The borders between materials and those related to sculpture and their surroundings are some of the central interests in the new series of works by Frida Baranek. This equation between matter and space is inherent to sculpture in its historical perspective; from antiquity to the ephemerality of the installations made in the last fifty years, showing a three-dimensional art object has always been configured as a tensioning between scales, colors and materialities.

“Play / Live” 2014

In Mudança de Jogo [‘Game Change’], the absence of metallic elements that have become characteristic in the work of Frida Baranek could be construed as a sign of transformation. Even so, many of the materials comprising the new sculptures have been used by her before. Indeed, her work has made use of processed materials from the mineral, vegetable and animal realms, such as marble dust and bits of rubber, felt and leather, or otherwise in the form of artefacts, as in this case: glass rods and hula hoops, hemp bags, sisal rope. The difference now is not so much in their variety, but rather the simultaneity with which she displays and experiments with them. And significantly, this calls to mind the beginning of her journey.

“Confrontos”, MAM-RJ 2013

Confrontos refers to an attitude as much as to a work process, thus introducing an affective dimension that infuses the object with a lived-in emotion, in a confrontation where to endeavor and to try oneself out appear as constitutive elements of the experience. The existential poetic, the need to confront and to confront oneself without any formal predetermination, reveals the phenomenological approach of these objects. Art and life form a whole that originates within the experience itself. The sculpture of Frida Baranek is the expression of the examination of her perceptive life, her feelings and emotions.

Detachment and instability

Frida Baranek’s trajectory is punctuated by her constant displacements — a voluntary poetic diaspora that led her to leave Brazil to study in the United States, to return here, to move to Europe (Paris and then Berlin) and, finally, to settle in New York. Intentionally displaced — or belonging in part to all these places at once — she sought in sculpture a counterpoint to movement. Since the 1980s, weight and a raw materiality have been the recurrent elements of her work, a temporary way of taking root, given the contingency of movement. The use of materials is a determinant element of her poetic. They present themselves without rejecting an originally chaotic drive, tensioned by an act of ordering. It is from within this tension between structure and informality that symbolic anxieties silently come unmoored. [...]

"Lange Pause"

What immediately struck me about the sculptures of Frida Baranek was how they both command and cede to their materiality. Her control of her media never feels controlling. Instead there is a palpable release into the physicality of whatever materials she uses, which have been many. They have included iron plate, bronze and iron wire, iron chains, powdered pigment, sisal, silk, deflating and disintegrating latex balloons, fragments of airplanes, and marble in blocks, shards, and pebbles. [...]

"Thought in action"

One of the greatest enigmas of art history-with ramifications, of course, in psychology and related sciences – is the question of what factors underlie creativity. No matter how much is written on this subject – and the theories are countless- there are three elements that combine in multiple ways: intuition, thought, and knowledge. Starting with intuition, and taking advantage of her artistic vision and familiarity with materials, Frida Baranek uses wire, iron, wood, stone, plastic, copper, stainless steel and aluminum as her main ingredients. She creates, thus, a game of combining forms and materials, one that takes into account the tension generated between these different elements in the name of a recurring preoccupation: to render thought visible in the form of sculptural action. [...]