Zip'Up: Horizonte suspenso: Helô Mello

5 September - 5 October 2019

[virtual tour]

 

Expired films, erratic cameras, blind juxtapositions and the incorporation of noise generated by a chance-riddled creative process form the lexicon of the research that artist Helô Mello has developed in recent years, which has resulted in the show Hanging Horizon that the Zipper Gallery now hosts in the Zip'Up project.

 

Such strategies, according to the artist, aim to "demolish symbols" in order to generate a "noisy remembrance that floats in the present of an intangible past." Thus, we are faced with complex artworks that renounce the space-time that the photographic image generally makes emerge from a definable past, so we then enter into a temporal relationship of total instability.

 

Marked by uncertainties and incidents, these "hanging horizons" mimic with light flashes and their feverish blues the crisscrossing movements of memory, the fragmented perception of time, desires of the future, and the sum of amalgamated days in landscapes that invoke the extemporaneous; in short, the quintessence of life, which Helô Mello stubbornly pursues with her many skills and, above all, the way she knows how to celebrate encounters, friendship, motherhood, and love.

 

This whole experience of living intensely and affectionately the sum of the hours created a lacunal space in her life, which naturally overflowed to her artistic production. It is this particular aspect of the life of the person and the artist that infiltrates between the first and so many other planes that become displaced from the surface of her disquieting artworks.

 

From these thick horizons burst fragments of recurring dreams, fortuitous castles we long to build, cliffs that defied our convictions, beaches our childhood catalogued, mountains we climbed or don't even know if we’ve reached, and thunderstorms that made us learn not fear fear itself.

 

Volatile images that roam our existence arise in this whirlwind of hanging horizons, after being captured by the artist's spirit-eye who transcends the photographic game to grasp every minute lived and thus merge life and art from her humanistic, nostalgic, fabulous perception.

 

Eder Chiodetto