Ouro branco [White Gold], 2015

Erika Verzutti
1971, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo

In her sculptures, drawings, photographs, paintings and installations, Erika Verzutti offers the viewer a world that seems to be suspended between fantasy and reality, abstraction and figuration, heaven and earth, building a kind of archaeo-cosmological catalogue. The artist works with real objects, from which she produces casts and replicas that she then modifies, cuts, paints and juxtaposes. Construction materials and tools, tropical fruit and vegetables are constantly present in her sculptural collages, whose titles often refer to traditional elements from the history of Western and Brazilian art. Verzutti also explores other possibilities of construction, combining materials such as styrofoam, paper and fiber glass to form monumental sculptures and paintings. Examples are the three panels commissioned for the 32nd Bienal: floating blocks that exhibit a mysterious set of inscriptions and symbols that hark back to a primordial idea of writing furrowed into the heavy rock walls of a cave. At the same time, the works take us in the opposite direction of this prehistorical reference, as if they represented the night sky. Between painting and sculpture, these works give a new scale to a set of reliefs, formerly in bronze, which now are molded in papier-mâché.