Gravura Brasileira

 "Between The Street and Art History"

November, 10, 2020 - March 13, 2021

In his third solo exhibition at the Gravura Brasileira gallery, artist Cláudio Caropreso revisits images from the History of Art and his own woodcut plates, manipulating the printing processes and deconstructing the figures in original reinterpretations.

 Watch the video:

"Process of overlapping colors, relief print and stencil"

by artist Cláudio Caropeso

edition: Alice Besen

https://youtu.be/H3zTq1-u9Ko

"Between the street and art history" 

Omega Replica Watches  

No post-pop-art art is indifferent to the movement that revolutionized countless artistic trajectories in the world, here in Brazil the wave reverberates in magnanimous professionals since the 1960s. The works radiate certain elements of irony, kitsch, humor and iconoclasm. He takes pains to reconstitute events in a libertine way, profanely blesses what he conceptualizes, reflects, scoffs at. Add these characteristics to the ideas of Expressionism, its way of distorting emotions, evoking inner fears and the uncertainties of reality and breathe. Claudio Caropreso`s prints originate from this strong and polyphonic fusion in which pop-art and Expressionism are shown in a way that is both underlined and difficult to choose which of these movements overlaps at first sight. Both and neither, here it is in contemporary times.

The impetuosity of color captures ever-present social criticism. Caropreso leaves traces of a transformed everyday life. The voluptuousness of a Schiele model becomes the enigmatic sorceress who brings love to couples, a character so common in urban informality and Brazilian reality. A child with a downcast has the inscription “not yet so cruel” on his forehead, anticipating that, for many, hatred comes to remove all the purity of an innocent time. In a tribute to the South African William Kentridge, he marks his outline with Cyrillic letters, which evokes an image of a fading power that may not come from the artist, but from the very biography of influential men.

I separate, on my own initiative, three works that denounce strong self-portrait essays. The head split in half with the mirroring of the word "reject" is his eternal fight with the inner ego and an immense modesty as an artist. In the work that reproduces a poster by a professor of engraving and painting sparsely written in meaningless German, the artist seems to hide in a code in which no one will find it. In the recycling cart with a phone number, Claudio Caropreso timidly reproduces the box of Brillo soap and Campbell`s soup cans by Andy Warhol along with “the fountain” by Marcel Duchamp. In this work, he announces himself as this anti-hero, the Jackson of New York, the one who takes and reuses everything that art history has given him. There, he reflects sideways his craft treated as a disposable article and the gross social inequality that increasingly distances him from the possibility of integration between his characters and himself.

Caropreso unites current and somber references to enhance the street, urbanity and, thus, its figures are the protagonists of a theater within the engraving, a metalanguage of paintings and drawings contextualized in the present time so that we never forget that the marginalized of yesterday are on the walls of museums today. "

Aurea Vieira, September, 2020.

Cláudio Caropreso 

( São José dos Campos – Brazil, 1975)

Cláudio Caropreso lives and works in the city of São José dos Campos, Brazil.   

He is a visual artist

He studied prinymaking with George Rembrandt Gutlich and Francisco José Maringelli. 

He graduated in Architecture and Urbanism at UNIVAP (Universidade do Vale do Paraíba)

Since 2003 has participated in many collective expositions .

He has received the following awards :

2003 – Prize of Acquisition  ( 1° Exhibition of Contemporary Art - Araraquara, SP ) 

2003 -  Prize of Acquisition  ( 30°   Exhibition of  New Art - Santos, SP)

2004 – Prize of Acquisition  ( 31°   Exhibition of  New Art -  Santos, SP)

2004 – Prize of Acquisition ( 29°  Exhibition of Contemporary Art -  Ribeirão Preto, SP )

2004 – Prize of Acquisition ( 36º   Exhibition of Contemporary Art – Piracicaba, SP)