SAO PAULO.- Galeria Fortes Vilaça presents Russia by Mauro Restiffe. The solo exhibition features a series of black-and-white photographs which portray two distinct moments of the cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in post-Soviet Russia. The works represent a return to one of his most important investigative projects, carried out in two stages: the first during the 1990s; and the second in 2015, as an opportunity to take up the work again at the invitation of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, in Moscow.

For this show, Restiffe associates his continuous research into architecture and urban spaces to a personal and affective experience of these two major Russian urban centres. To him, the creation process that encompassed this photographic series kindles his lifelong interest in exploring an entirely different culture and his pioneering spirit, which ultimately led him to adopt a more intimist approach tothe time-space relation within his own work. Restiffe’s gaze renders the evolutionary process of these cities as he portrays daily anecdotal scenes, characters and interiors. The parallel drawn between these two timelines reveal the experimental character of the first images, in stark contrast to the searing sharpness and the distinctive aesthetic quality of the more recent ones, which together clearly evince his interest in the modernist elements in architecture and in the poetic dialogues between people, objects and their environment.

The artist’s poetical investigation superposes the documental language with references from art history and photography. The use of analogic black-and-white film is not made at random; rather it is a resource that enables the artist to delve into the concept of representation and explore the possibilities of deconstruction of the real. For this exhibition, the combination between the series produced twenty years ago and the current one is formalized through diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs, which draws on juxtaposition to form groups of images that dichotomize the past and the present, the public and the private, the affective and the mundane. Winter Trap (1996/2015),Corner Theatre (1995/2015), Ghosts (1996/2015) and Modelling (1995/2015) are a few examples of these works.

Mauro Restiffe was born in 1970 in São José do Rio Pardo, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. He lives and works in São Paulo. His recent solo exhibitions include: Post-Soviet Russia 1995/2015, Garage Museum (Moscow, 2016); São Paulo, Fora de Alcance, Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, 2014); Obra, MAC-USP (São Paulo, 2013). The artist has participated in the following biennials: Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, Japan, 2016); Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador, 2014); São Paulo Biennial (2006); Panorama de Arte Brasileira (São Paulo, 2013 and 2005); among others. His work can be found in several important collections, such as Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), Colección Cisneros (Caracas), Inhotim (Brumadinho, Brazil), Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro), MAC-USP (São Paulo), MAM (São Paulo), Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo), SFMOMA (San Francisco), Tate Modern (London), TBA21 (Vienna), among others.