Essas pessoas na sala de jantar
(These people in the dining room)
Museu Eva Klabin. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Curadoria Raphael Fonseca.
Photos: Mario Grisolli
2023.
The boudoir is a small office adjoining the bedroom that belonged to the collector Eva Klabin (1903-1991). Like the rest of the building, the boudoir is full of European architectural and decorative references, which are added to a collection of works of art with a marked Western affiliation, by artists such as Rugendas (1802-1858), Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755-1830), the Italian Pietro Roi (1820-1896), among others.
It was in this space that Lopes carried out a simple intervention: subtly replacing part of the collection with a series of unpublished works by the artist. His different works propose to approach a series of representations of Brazilian territory published in atlases, magazines, books and posters, which have in common the attempt to sketch an imaginary of modern Brazil in the mid-twentieth century.
Appropriating these images, the artist seeks to denaturalize possible hegemonic narratives by subtracting or adding information from these maps. In the end, the works shed light on the hypothesis that these representations, like Boudoir, are more about importing a notion of Brazil
and less about glimpsing any perspective of the world produced by the country itself.
