Restless Geometry

Ascânio MMM is an artist whose work combines various influences and questions central to Brazilian art in the last fifty years. His production has maintained a high degree of internal consistency in diverse domains such as constructivism, architecture, the truth of materials, the dialectics between planning and execution, art in public spaces, three-dimensionality, and planar composition.

This exhibition maps the path traced by Ascânio MMM throughout his career. His unwavering search for form, impervious to passing trends, has driven the artist in his creation of precise and surprising pieces, in the revival of a constructivist ideal. Along this path, like his neoconcrete predecessors, his continuous use of geometry has excluded neither chance nor poetry.

During these months, his permanent sculpture in Casa Roberto Marinho’s garden, an example of kinetic transparency intriguing to the gaze, is gaining two companions to celebrate the fusion between architecture, artwork, and the garden’s landscape.

For this exhibition, Ascânio produced a large-scale piece, Prisma 13, made especially for the plateau in the garden, at the level of the bridge spanning the Carioca River. The dialogue between the sculpture and the surrounding forest is achieved through its transparency, while its scale promotes an engaging visual experience of the various levels of the terrain. The lightness of its large hollow volumes produces the magic of its not being there, while still being there.

In Casa Roberto Marinho’s exhibition spaces, we are presenting an extensive show covering all the facets of Ascânio MMM’s artistic path, complete with statements from critics and historians who have followed the work of this Rio-based artist born in Fão, Portugal. As they walk through the spaces and read the texts, visitors will gain a clear understanding of the paths and cultural environment of various social moments in Brazil’s history. Here, we celebrate not only the enduring nature of his dynamic poetics, but also revisit analyses of his work by some of the leading critics and thinkers in the world of Brazilian contemporary art.

On the ground floor, Ascânio himself is presenting various pieces he has selected from the Roberto Marinho Collection. This continues the Casa’s series of solo shows in which specific artists are invited to show their own works while also interacting with and reframing pieces from our collection.

Ascânio's pieces combine optimism and good-humored skepticism with an aesthetic that is not embarrassed by its own beauty. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, intercrossings of languages, testings of limits, unidentified objects, and astrolabes for mapping the present. An archaeology of the possible future for the métier of a Brazilian constructivist artist.

Lauro Cavalcanti
Executive Director
Casa Roberto Marinho