Galeria Superfície is pleased to present the exhibition Reverse by Rita Damasceno. Born in Salvador (BA) in 1959, Rita began her primary studies in São Paulo and, at age 16, decided to move to Germany, where she lived for over 30 years. Graduated in Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Cologne, Rita began her artistic production in the 1980s, initially working with drawing, then painting and sculpture. During the same period, she had the opportunity to attend classes with the artist Joseph Beuys, at the University of Düsseldorf, during the controversial year in which the artist decided to open his classes to everyone in the room at the FIU (Free International University). After this long experience outside her home country, Rita Damasceno returns to Brazil in 2011 and earns a scholarship at Fundação Armando Álvaro Penteado (FAAP), where she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts in 2015.

In this exhibition, the artist presents a series of drawings on canvas on a large scale and another on paper in a reduced size. Her work starts from drawing diagrams as a form of visual representation of a given concept or idea, a scheme that is often related to science and art. In a juxtaposition of image and text, Rita creates her poetic universe establishing connections between issues related to philosophy, science and the modus operandi of being contemporary. Her quest is to displace the diagram from the operational context and transport it to the artistic field, where its poetic potential can act as a vehicle for the expansion of knowledge or a kind of self-study, of self-knowledge, which for philosophy is an object of investigation, with finality in the search for an ethical nature, an explanation of what is known and how it is known. The title Reverse that the artist gives to the exhibition already indicates something related to the interior, an indication of the interior of the body, inviting the viewer to dive into the universe of her diagrams.

In most of her works — and mainly in the titles — there is the prefix UR, which in the German language refers to the primordial, a concept that can be associated with the essential but also with chaos, which according to the Greek poet Hesiod (700 BC ) “chaos is the primordial state of the world”, an allusion to what begins, as a force charged with a certain potential. For the artist, creation arises from chaos, a state where it finds material for the act of creating, “the artistic process begins in the chaos of ideas, intuitions, knowledge itself”. Here we see chaos as a motive, as an initial impulse, a place where Rita Damasceno finds the possibilities for reflection and development of her work.

The UR series of diagrams present circumstances of disquiet and questioning without a dogmatic discernment of judgment. It aims more at opening discussions than answers or results, it displaces diagrams of scientific use to build a poetics that speaks not only about human existence, but also about its contradictions.