VENOSA Angelo

Angelo Venosa was one of the founders of the Ateliê da Lapa, along with Daniel Senise (1955- ), Luiz Pizarro (1958- ) and João Magalhães (1945- ), with which he worked between 1984 and 1990. During this time, the artist produced his first tri-dimensional pieces, moving away from painting, which he had worked with during his time as a student at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. With this change in trajectory that occurred early in his career, Venosa became known as one of the few exceptions of the Brazilian 'Generation 80' as he worked exclusively with sculpture rather than painting. As part of a group of artists that rebelled against the tradition of formalism in Brazil, Venosa's practice is characterized by mixing materials, genres, and historical movements, resulting in figures and shapes that evoke anatomical structures, such as vertebras and bones of both imaginary and real beings.

In his work, the relationship between shapes and materials is fundamental. The materials he tends to makes use of, which include marble, wax, metal, glass, acrylic and animal teeth, play into the modeling and perception of the resulting pieces. Often, his works display an intertwinement of lines and volumes that suggest an encounter between sculpture and drawing. The fact that his pieces evoke, but do not represent reality –with organic materials and inorganic shapes– causes a certain peculiarity leaving the viewer with a sense of ambiguous temporality that suggests both ancestral references and a dystopian future at once.