Antonio Arney

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum brings to the public of Piraquara, the birthplace of the artist Antonio Arney, the exhibition “Structures and Values”. His fellow citizens will be able to see in this exhibition a bit of his long and consistent trajectory, with more than 60 years of artistic production.

Arney's wooden works take us back to a world built in respect to nature, coming from trees and the knowledge of adding elements, as well as the values of life: the landscape, the city, others, the house or a social architecture.

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

By bringing a bit of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum to other municipalities in the state through itineraries, the institution extends its reach. At the same time, it invites greater integration of Paraná's culture.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Director-President of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Within the Brazilian constructive spirit, so revered as it is important, the work of Antonio Arney represents a rare aesthetic exception in the panorama of art. 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 poetic, new sap, worldview, and incorporation of heterodox elements, not previously catalogued in this visual repertoire.

It is an ascetic work that revolves around the same generative matrix, which is, at the same time, abstract and material, deepening and modulating a coherent research with successive variations, modulations. An unsuspected and submerged serial side of his work; it aims to be more infinite or variable than delimited or fixed (his painting is iconographically obsessive in its field investigation, like 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 perfume of things (memory or function). It brings us closer to them, either by the unusual elements at play (wooden plates, screws, dyed papers, screens, objects), or by the visual arrangement of its configuration (shapes, iconography, colors). A corpus that is singular for erecting a paradoxical imagery of geometric elements by means of used and discarded materials, providing an oblique porosity between painting and 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 two-dimensionality, within the strict limit of the plane (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, shutters... a type of objectual architecture is constructed, in other words, almost a pictorial model. Or would they be models of a larger painting-architecture?

In any case, there is a request for presence and relationship that expands in this painting, as Arney's 'sculptural' pieces want to bring us into a contingency, a closeness, and not a visual escapism or a distant fantasy of one who flees from the here and now. And despite the symmetrical compositions, the manifest balance of his paintings, his symbolic contribution is not transcendentalist but rather a product 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 us to combine realignments: us with others, things, the city, nature. It is time to recognize the search for possible exchanges in activation, new adhesions or games.

Thus, the omnipresent materiality of this assembled, screwed, repaired painting seems to symbolize the silent power of its images. Then, its rough secret, half real-unreal or fictional, in short, is the place of the immaterial 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 standards) is made through visual equations that never reveal the unknown: to the value of the exact is added the value of the irregular, as two contradictory measures-structures per se, 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. In the end, all of Antonio Arney's work represents a pictorial space between dissimilar things, a poetics of the interval.

Adolfo Montejo Navas & Eliane Prolik
Curators