Opening Wednesday September 5th, 2007, 6:00 to 8:30 PM
The exhibition will remain open until October 5th, 2007
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM

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Blow de la Barra is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in London of Carla Zaccagnini.

The exhibition at Blow de la Barra is called Wish and it is mainly based on works that deal with desire and its necessary insatisfaction. The invite produced for the exhibition is a calendar running from September 2007 to December 2008. It was designed by Pipa according to the same ideas/solutions she used for a similar calendar for the year 2003, which we designed together in 2002 and was distributed as an edition of the journal Planeta Capacete, edited by Helmut Batista, an artist/curator from Rio de Janeiro. The image printed in that one was a mountain, very solid, very permanent. The year would pass, the calendar would age, the paper would turn yellow, but the mountain would be in the same place, almost unchanged. In the new version, the image I am using is an ice cream melting on the pavement; not only because of the melting quality, the impermanence, but also for the evidence that something has just happened, for the guessed frustration of the person who let it fall.

Jogo Transparente (Transparent Game) is one of the works in the show. It is, as the descriptive title already makes quite clear, a transparent deck of cards. This work was first presented at the exhibition This is not a Love Song (Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, 2006), and it is now on show in Buenos Aires, as part of the exhibition Vida Pública (Public Life). I really like the idea of it being in such different contexts, being read in these different ways. What I like about it is that it is a very simple thing, a very small change into something we all know that obliges us to rethink our strategies and our position. Games are the social spaces in which rules become more evident. Here the rules are not changed, you can play the same games, but the possibility of bluffing is taken away. So what happens to a game when you cannot hide what you have anymore? In this exhibition, I am more interested in the tense situation of you knowing each other’s cards, you seeing the card you need in your rival's hands reciprocally, and at the same time knowing that you probably won't have it, even it being so close.

Wish (the Antwerp series) is the work after which the exhibition is titled. It compiles a series of photographs of people looking at diamonds displayed in shopping windows. They were taken in Antwerp last year. As you might know, especially if you are into diamonds, Antwerp is the mecca for these precious stones, and there are lots of small shops close to the central train station with their windows full with them. In these series of ‘stolen portraits of people’, the relationship to the object of desire and the obstacles between it and the subject becomes very clear. But, what really interests me is seeing other people, the visitors to the show, looking at pictures of people looking at diamonds.

There are also two works dealing with the impossibility of fulfilling our wishes and desires inside the logic of the art market. Both of them represent the sky. The first one is a silkscreen on silk. A light blue silk printed in white with a series of seven different photographs of clouds. The images are printed randomly resulting on 15 meters of fabric printed with no continuous pattern. The print is sold by the meter, in the same way fabric is usually sold in the shops. But there is no pattern that repeats itself after a certain time (or space). So by buying 1 meter or 10 meters you will always end up only with a fragment, a piece or a part of the print. It is of course, an unlimited edition.

The other sky piece, Rompecabezas (which will arrive to the exhibition after the opening) is a porcelain puzzle made up of 40 pieces, measuring around 120 x 120 cm when completed. In this work, the different pieces are sold separately and each person can only have one. We are producing three editions, one with the London sky as it has been forecasted for the opening night; another one with São Paulo’s sky, and a third one with the sky of Guadalajara (where the work it's being produced). We will only show the London version at the gallery. It will be hand painted in the same dark blue traditionally used for porcelain and tiles.

E pur si Muove is a video recorded in Abisko, a national park in the far north of Sweden, crossing the arctic polar circle. I went to Abisko at the beginning of July with my turntable, a transformer, two video cameras, and Jan Johanson’s album Music from the Last Four Centuries to see and film the midnight sun. I took the metro to the train station, the bus to the airport, the plane to Kiruna, the bus to Abisko and the chair lift to Nuolja Mountain carrying all that stuff. Then I walked with all of this (and a car battery) to a chosen spot, some rocks from which you can see the sun floating over a mountain chain behind a lake. I connected the transformer to the car battery and the record player to the transformer. I put the record on, and the camera on top of a facing-down glass on the centre of the record. I pressed play and waited hiding from the wind and the camera behind some rocks, turning the record and changing the tapes when needed. The result is a 68 minutes long video in which the sublime landscape cannot really be apprehended and a very rhythmic wind continuously interrupts the music. I was very doubtful at the beginning, but now I really like the video. I like that it is about an almost forbidden or at least a dangerous subject (the sunset, even if the sun doesn't set) and yet you can hardly see it. I like that it gives you a 360 degrees continuous recording of the experience but you are always so far from it. It is very much about representation and its impossibility to get close to real experience.

Another somehow circular piece, Selfmademan is a small sculpture (7 cm high) cast in lead, originally produced for Zoo Portfolio last year. It departed from two references: on one hand the lead soldiers which boys from older generations used to play with, on the other hand an iron relief I found in my house when I bought it, in ruins, years ago. The relief depicts a man in the act of pouring melted metal into a cast. This action is reproduced in the three-dimensional model. The small lead man casting himself is also a self-portrait of the model maker who made it.

Finally, the exhibition includes the text The mountain, the sea and the sertão, originally written in Portuguese, to be published in a magazine I edit in São Paulo with a group of friends. Número is a thematic publication and that was an issue dedicate to “The real”. Even if the text has been written from what is supposed to be a different perspective – that of the art critic – I think it announces the main issues addressed by the video E pur si muove. I like how these two activities and views can be complementary, distinct ways of saying what one thinks. I am also interested in the displacement of the text to an exhibition context. And, of course, in the continuation of the exhibition experience that can be provided by a piece of writing that you can take with you and read at a different place, at a different time, in the rhythm and scenario you choose, accessing it again and again. As you wish.

Carla Zaccagnini, 2007

Carla Zaccagnini (Buenos Aires, 1973) is an artist based in São Paulo. Some of her most recent exhibitions include: Encuentro Internacional Medellin 2007, Museo de Antioquia, Medellin (2007), 10 Defining Experiments, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2006), Abstração e Referência, Paço das Artes, São Paulo (2006), Percurso Ótico, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (2005); Até onde a vista alcanza, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2004); Formas de Pensar, MALBA, Buenos Aires (2004); PR04, Puerto Rico Bienal 2004, Puerto Rico and Total Motiviert, Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2003). In 2007, she has been in residency at Iaspis, Stockholm, and will have a solo show at MAMAM no Pátio, a program organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna, Recife, Brazil. She has She integrates the selection of artists at Cream 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 2003) and the annual 50 international emerging artists (London: Contemporary Magazine, January 2006). She has been awarded with CIFO 2006 Grants Program.

Carla Zaccagnini’s Transparent Game decks of cards are available from the gallery office for £30.00.

Catálogo Traducido 2006 and Catálogo (English Edition 2006) by Carla Zaccagnini are available from the gallery office for £2.00 each.