Tiago Mestre’s solo exhibition Smoke Gets In Your Eyes presents a group of ceramic sculptures that seem to occupy a fluid position between binary ideas of nature versus artifice and fleetingness versus permanence.
Smoke as a diaphanous and mysterious substance, water as an ever-flowing element, and the mashrabiya – a type of latticework used in modern Brazilian architecture -, create a set of relationships between the works. By approximating these images, Mestre aims to interrogate the appropriation of nature through systematic cultural though, while also attempting to confer landscape with an idea of stylisation or constructive grammar. Sculptural language and making are posited here as the organising parameters in the construction of an emotional and inconclusive narrative related to the ideas of visibility and desire.Tiago Mestre is currently an artist in residence at Gasworks, London. The artworks in this exhibition have been produced in the Troy Town Art Pottery.
Tiago Mestre (Portugal, b. 1978.) Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazi. Recent solo exhibitions include Noite, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); Fundação, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil (2016), All The Things You Are, Kunsthalle São Paulo (2014); and Specific Sunset, Wiels Residency Projects, Brussels, Belgium (2009). Recent group exhibitions include Completely Something Else, curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Chipre (2016); Current Art Festival 2015 – Things Without Names, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2015); and Escape, curated by Jurgen Bock, Lund’s Konsthall, Sweden (2011).
Tiago Mestre’s practice is concerned with the idea of displacement, both in terms of discipline and territory. Originally trained as architect, his sculptures and installations reflect his status as a Portuguese artist living and working in Brazil and the historical associations of human and artistic flows between the two countries. The work actively resists a singular reading and engages with different symbolic and anthropological registers through a critical approach to materiality and modes of presentation.
