Collier West Gallery is pleased to present “Telégrafos” by Marcelo Daldoce, on view September 7th through October 3rd.
Marcelo Daldoce’s current body of paintings references the Brazilian Telegraphic Commission of the 1890’s. This commission intended to integrate, using telegraphic lines, the very isolated Western region of Brazil with the developed East.
In the course of constructing the line, the man in charge — Marechal Cândido Rondon — encountered many indigenous groups which had never had contact with civilization.
These encounters were first met with aggression. Once, Rondon was nearly killed by a poisoned arrow, but insisted that his men not retaliate. Rondon’s motto was: “Die if need be, but never kill.” Rondon had a partly indigenous heritage; he was a humanist and a follower of the philosophy of Positivism. These attributes eventually established cordial relations with the natives.
In the end, the Telegraphic Commission wiring work became obsolete because of the invention of radio lines. However, the commission wound up becoming something more: it set out to create a scientific database to give a full-bodied understanding of the unknown Brazilian West, including the collection of plants and animals, the mapping of rivers, and photos and videos of the indigenous cultures. The commission continues to have anthropological and scientific significance.
This research marked the first data collected by Brazilians. Before the Commission, science was established by foreigners, and most of the collected material ended up in Europe or USA. The expedition knew the importance of those records and videos.
The series of small B&W paintings, “Vestindo Branco,” seeks to exemplify those records. Indigenous peoples were lined up and dressed one by one in white clothes — a powerful visual representation of their ostensible assimilation into the conqueror’s culture. The integration was physically non-aggressive. However, it was certainly symbolically aggressive.
The expedition knew the indigenous would slowly shed old habits; manners and culture would disappear with the implementation of the conquerer’s new customs and other shifts in civilization.
Today, many indigenous groups are totally integrated with modern life. And the material of the Commission is a way for them to affirm their identity and memory, to look back and recognize the essence of their previous existence.
The settings of Daldoce’s paintings invite the viewer to enter the artists’ own analysis of his previous existence in Brazil.
As someone who feels this lack of unity, art-making is a means of exploring and claiming the artist identity through the significance of the places he creates. He paints the sublime as a fantastical realm to escape. Making a better world for himself: a kind of of meditation. Representational painting allows him to inhabit those places completely, even if it is for a short while.
As the Brazilian playwriter Nelson Rodrigues had said: “Brazil is not a country, it is not a nation, it is not a people: it is a landscape.”
Marcelo Daldoce (b. 1979 / Brazil), lives and works in New York. In 2016, he received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He has shown in museums in Austria and Bahia/Brazil, art fairs, and private collections. He has been in group shows in Brazil, NYC; Sotheby’s, among other galleries internationally. His work has been published on the cover of There and GQ Magazines. Daldoce’s works have been featured in Juxtapoz and Hifructose, among other art publications. Through the New York Academy of Art, he earned residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program in Germany and Eric Fischl Residency in Maryland. In 2017, he was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant.
