Brasilia / Works - 1993 > .......
Presentation
The city of Brasilia is at the origin of four series of works, carried out between the mid-1990s and 2013.
Brasilia. Flesh and Soul (Brasília. De Carne e Alma) mainly explores the formal and symbolic relationships between the volumes of the architecture imagined by Oscar Niemeyer for the capital of Brazil, and the human's body architecture and own structural and aesthetic shapes.
Brasília. Cinqüenta Anos evokes the city's 50th Jubilee, celebrated in 2010. This series deepens the research on the correspondences between built architecture and human body’s architecture inaugurated by the previous series. That corpus is enriched by the L'Homme de Brasilia painting, a tribute to the movie L'Homme de Rio by Philippe de Broca.
Construção! (Construction!) brings together a set of large format sketches on paper stretched on canvas, all based on the theme of the city of Brasilia’s working site, a site born and built out of nowhere in less than four years, which resulted into the city’s inauguration in 1960.
A Ausência (The Absence) is the title of a series of a four paintings polyptych produced in 2013, commemorating Oscar Niemeyer's passing (1907-2012). This sequence offers an allegorical vision of the architect’s birth, life and death : birth and disappearance are symbolized by two abstract punctuations of a cosmic dimension and meaning, which frame his Path of Life, the latter bringing together in a poetic symbiosis the two key locations in the architect’s career : the Carioca panorama so dear to his heart, visible beyond the bay windows of his Avenida Atlântica's workshop, and his masterpiece, the city of Brasilia with its emblematic Metropolitan Cathedral building, which appears in the landscape of Rio de Janeiro as if being built on the Copacabana beach. A Ausência (The Absence) was presented in the context of the Brasilia. Half A Century Of The Capital Of Brazil exhibition, in Spring 2013, at the Espace Niemeyer in Paris.
© Jacques Benoit. Design, works, photographies and texts by Jacques Benoit and under the author’s copyright. Except when derived from other sources and then mentioned as such.