Urban visuality is for Tchelo the raw material that art investigates, analyses and processes through different approaches - from drawing, sculpture, painting, photography, video, installations and the making of objects. These media deconstruct the intrinsic and sometimes even banal meanings attributed to the materials present in everyday life and - with a radical non-figuration that goes back to the minimalist matrixes of Donald Judd and Frank Stella - what is mass-produced and what is industrial in metropolitan reality, in Tchelo's art, expresses everything it is capable of expressing exactly for what it is - devoid of subjective appeals and consumerist fetishisms.
Tchelo's artistic activity in its breadth and variety maintains, vigorously and coherently, the tendency to challenge the barriers between drawing, sculpture and performance, between the physical laws that define the act of life and that of making art. His work springs from the very instant in which contradiction and ambiguity merge to surprise the viewer and to generate instances of 'action-drawing', 'inanimate performance' and 'living-sculpture'.
Leaving little trace of his initial performance in the works he produces, Tchelo allows physical laws such as that of combustion and gravity, and chance, to decide the elements that make up art, the signs it may contain and its interaction with the world surrounding the aesthetic domain. Subsequently, the 'by-products' obtained in this type of investigation, can be deliberately manipulated, reorganised and disaggregated with the intention of transgressing uses, breaking norms, creating new rules, taking risks between chaos and order or inventing procedures in a formally simple but intellectually complex artistic practice. The strategy is highly successful, since all of Tchelo's works speak coherently about it, emphasizing and reinforcing it in the construction of a sober, clean and haughty visual narrative - where the artist renounces his own subjectivity to let materiality speak for itself.
Perception, however, is not left out of this conceptualist equation, for Tchelo, even the most minimalist of lines and the most synthetic of materials are constitutive components of the sensorial processes with which we perceive and memorize form and content. The philosophical bias runs through Tchelo's work as much as the psychological-perceptive one, since for the artist, in the work of art, a line, that is, the simplest of aesthetic decisions, has profound implications: in fact, a line can unite or divide, it can be border or path, margin or passage, unity or sequence, drawing or word, body, space or time.
Tchelo has exhibited his work internationally: from the Soares Reis National Museum in Porto (2017), to the Perracini Gallery in Miami (2016)i and the Brazilian British Centre in Sao Paulo (2015). He has premiered work in group exhibitions at the A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town (2017), the CAC - Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati (2017), and the renowned Gentil Carioca Gallery in Rio de Janeiro (2016), just to name a few. Is work is part of the public collection of the CAC in the US, the Biennial Foundation of Cervera in Portugal, and the MAPA Museum in Brazil.
By Kalinca Costa Söderlund
