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PRESENTATION
November 19 - December 23, 2022
Organized by: Proa Foundation and PROA21
Thanks: Floating Island - Association Amigos Proa
Sponsors: Tenaris - Ternium
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The XXI exhibition of the Brazilian artist Luiz Roque opens at PROA21. For the first time in our country, three videos can be seen -XXI, Urubu and Dibujos- and a totem-installation, which make up a fluctuating journey between the limits of the private and the public.

His city and nighttime aesthetic, linked to the themes of the LGBT + community, runs through all of his work. Large architectural masses of the buildings of São Paulo -like the Louvre condominium in front of which the artist lives-, carrion birds that can be observed from the window, sex workers at the door of the buildings; dating apps and an aesthetic reminiscent of the pop format of video clips are some of the imaginaries that can be seen in this exhibition.

The Milk of Dreams, the last Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani featured the works of him XXI and Urubu within its central exhibition.

Urubu is the name of a bird of prey that lives from the southern tip of South America to Canada. It is a large bird, with dark brown almost black plumage; head and neck plucked and red. Short, hooked beak, scavenger. It identifies carcasses with its keen vision and smell, flying low enough to detect the gases produced by the decomposition of dead animals. This bird lacks vocal organs, just like Roque's silent film of the same name.

PROA21 website: https://espacioproa21.wordpress.com/

Urubu was filmed on Super8, from his window, while the artist was confined during the pandemic to his home located in the Copán Building in São Paulo, an undulating modernist residential skyscraper created by Oscar Niemeyer and Carlos Alberto Cerqueira Lemos in the 1950s From there he captures the flight of the bird that traced circles in the air, before finishing identifying its food to descend in a tailspin.

The same condominium that serves as the scenery for the flight of the bird in Urubu, is the protagonist of the photographic installation that is part of the exhibition, whose shape is reminiscent of a pedestal or coffin. A gigantic mass of concrete where thousands of people live on top of each other. Shared intimacy and voyeurism as desecration.

XXI is a film with another tone, it is a funeral and it is also a party. Filmed in the City of Buenos Aires, between Chacarita and Paternal during 2021, it evokes sensitive issues such as disease and death, which have gone through our experience in the last 3 years of the pandemic, as well as the artist's personal biography. Video is his favorite medium and it is used in a format reminiscent of music video clips where sound is as important as image. But here the dematerialization of the video becomes tense and occupies the space. For his part, in his new work Drawings, Roque uses the photographs he obtains from dating applications where hot and hasty lines defy censorship.

In Latin American LGBT ++ language, his films intertwine family stories, identity aesthetic forms of Brazil and Latin America in general, with moods, human and non-human dialogues, territories, landscapes.

In a conversation with Matilde Sánchez for Clarín regarding his participation in Venice, Roque comments “In almost all my films there are cars, motorcycles, trains. There is always transfer. I don't move the camera, I like the straight shot, I prefer reality to move, be it bodies, animals or machines. Then there are all those things that affected me so much in these two years; my mother died of Covid in 2021 and my father had to be admitted the same month to the same sanatorium, with Alzheimer's. It was a devastating circumstance, which runs through XXI ”.

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