Antonio Arney

The Government of the State of Paraná and the Secretariat of Social Communication and Culture of the State of Paraná, through the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, with the support of the Guarapuava City Hall through the Municipal Department of Education and Culture, are pleased to present to the public the exhibition 'Structures and Values' by Paraná artist Antonio Arney, who has a long and consistent career with over 60 years of knowledge and experience.

Arney's woodworks remind us of a world built in respect for nature, stemming from trees and the knowledge of incorporating elements, as well as his life values: the landscape, the city, others, the home, and social architecture.

The artist points us to new meanings, potentials, and discoveries, leading us to reflect on reuse, sustainability, and recycling, as well as the importance of the memory of things and time, themes that are always current and relevant.

Bringing a bit of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum to this city is a way to extend the Museum's reach and to provide and encourage new encounters with art. At the same time, it is a proposal for greater integration of the cultural spaces of our State.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

In the Brazilian constructive spirit, so revered as important, the work of Antonio Arney represents a rare aesthetic exception in the art landscape. Due to the historical moment it is part of and the geography from which it projects, this temporal and local laterality, with respect to an artistic lingua franca, signifies a new poetics, a new sap, a worldview, and the incorporation of heterodox elements not cataloged until then in this visual repertoire.

It is an ascetic work that revolves around the same generating matrix, which is at the same time abstract and material, deepening and modulating a coherent research with successive variations and modulations. An unsuspected and submerged serial side of his work; it wants to be more infinite or variable than delimited or fixed (his painting is iconographically obsessive in its field investigation, as in Morandi, Fontana, Volpi, Mondrian, Van Velde, among others).

In fact, the reconciliation of a rigorous project and an eroded materiality allows this painting to embody in its construction a certain scent of things (memory or function). It brings us closer to them, either through the unusual elements at play (wooden plates, screws, dyed papers, screens, objects) or through the visual arrangement of its configuration (forms, iconography, colors). A corpus that is singular for erecting a paradoxical imagery of geometric elements through used materials and rejects, bringing an oblique porosity painting-world. It is an unusual collage that offers itself as a window, stage, or even architectural facade, in the memory of time and the world (the link of life, space, representation).

However, here, pictorial illusion is denied: this painting does not want to be summarized in pure bidimensionality, in the strict limit of the planar (its illusionist characteristic or vision beyond). The surface itself is resized with a different spatial apprehension and sensation, more physical. In his latest painting-architecture full of domes, arches, arcades, friezes, columns, transoms, blinds… a type of object-architecture is constructed, that is, almost a pictorial model. Or could they be models of a greater painting-architecture?

In any case, there is a request for presence and a relationship that expands in this painting, because Arney's “sculpturized” pieces want to bring us to a contingency, a closeness and not a visual escapism or a distant fantasy of one who escapes from the here and now. And despite the symmetrical compositions, the manifest balance of his paintings, his symbolic contribution is not transcendentalist but rather the result of the age of uncertainty in which we are installed.

The artist's half-century of production represents a legacy and invites us to recognize a unique, self-taught and particular pictorial map. The aesthetic provocation in Arney's work realigns waste and subjugates dominant visual orders. As a construct for survival, it teaches how to combine rearrangements: us with others, things, the city, nature. It is the time to perceive oneself in search of possible changes in activation, new adhesives or games.

In this way, the omnipresent materiality of this mounted, screwed, fixed painting seems to symbolize the silent power of its images. Thus, its rough secret, half real-unreal or fictional, in sum, is the place of immateriality where forms and structures are a value, a permanent work agenda. Arney's imaginary (closer to the ground than Rubem Valentim, another constructive out of the norm) is made through visual equations that never unveil the unknown: to the value of the exact is added the value of the irregular, as two structures-measures per se, contradictory of the artist, of his independent language. This painting maintains a precarious double life. It promises an intriguing visual allegory: that dialectic between transparency and opacity – “useful fictions”, according to Artur Freitas – never wants to be resolved. Basically, all of Antonio Arney's work represents a pictorial space between dissimilar things, a poetic of the interval.

Adolfo Montejo Navas & Eliane Prolik
Curators