This volume retraces the solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Zé Tepedino, held at the two locations of ABC-ARTE gallery in Genoa and Milan during the summer of 2024.
Zé Tepedino, a staunch advocate of autochthonous poetics—a unique and meaningful cultural expression aimed at reflecting the traditions, peculiarities, beliefs, mythologies, and experiences of a given people—seeks, through his practice, to convey a deeply personal and profound sense of connection with the land and the history of his homeland. His work, authentic, deliberately unembellished, and strongly identity-driven, serves as a medium for this connection.
Indeed, his creative process often begins with a careful observation of everything around him: during his daily explorations in Rio de Janeiro, he encounters materials, spaces, and prosaic situations that he selects to be poetically revisited, reorganized, or simply brought to light. Moving seamlessly between the calm of the beach and the chaotic city center, he recombines the diverse elements he finds, ultimately striving to discover plausible relationships between them.
Thus, through simple, congenial operations and the use of various techniques—ranging from sewing to assemblage, and from painting to sculpture—Tepedino aims to create arrangements that are always fresh and surprising, offering a new perception of everything we think we already know too well.
Through a distinctly gestural process, in his effort to best reorganize materials, colors, and shapes within the space where everything takes place, and in his endeavor to formalize variable ideas about the heterogeneity of times and traditions, he seeks to explore infinite possibilities for seeing, interpreting, and experiencing the world around us, even in all its semantic potential.
It is based on these premises that Fresta—a Portuguese noun meaning “fissure” in Italian—was conceived. This heterogeneous new exhibition chapter, designed specifically for both ABC-ARTE venues, is characterized by precise cuts, openings through which a fantastical landscape can be glimpsed, made of colors that, intersecting and merging, gracefully connect with something infinitely greater.
