Tainan Cabral: Medley

Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to present an online exhibition of new paintings by Brazilian artist Tainan Cabral. This is the fifth in an ongoing series of presentations by invited international artists on Vortic.

‘Nothing is entirely abstract. Everything has a feeling that drives this abstraction. But it’s also about something auditory in this music, like funk, dub, these sound waves. Each canvas has a lot of that.’

– Tainan Cabral

Informed by popular culture, in particular music and the streets around Senador Camará, a neighbourhood in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro where he lives and works, Tainan Cabral experiments with colour, geometric and biomorphic forms to create luminous works that, sustained and inspired by his surroundings, seek to impart a spirit of transcendence.

Using a range of techniques and materials, from drawing to painting, sculpture, graffiti and urban interventions, Cabral’s work can be seen as a response to what he describes as ‘the creativity and architecture of the ordinary person’. When working directly in his community, Cabral celebrates the home spun and improvisatory nature of, for example, street signs and waymarkers, or the ways in which plant life flourishes in repurposed tyres – bringing a sense of optimism or escapism to its often harsh realities.

His paintings, which are a more intimate expression of the same impulse, are generated through an almost synaesthetic process in which the sounds, shapes and movement of music – its rhythm, energy, harmony, dissonance, tone and mood – find equivalence in the sun-bleached colours of his surroundings as well as its visual forms, with the aim of arousing corresponding emotional or even spiritual states in the viewer.

Rio funk, born in the city’s peripheral neighbourhoods, is especially influential. The artist says: ‘I made a series on the foundations of funk, and that’s where the idea came from, in my most recent work, to keep looking at the structure of painting, the colours, this thing of bringing to painting the vibration of sound, the sound waves, and how they affect the body, that bass entering your pores. I’m trying get as close as possible to that sensation.’

With colour harmonies imparting a radiance that seems to dissolve certainties of form and inspire contemplation, Cabral’s paintings have been referred to as ‘Tropical Mysticism’. His work can be seen in dialogue with the Brazilian Neo-Concrete and Tropicália movements of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with the work of Hélio Oiticica. Yet, equally it finds kinship in various strands of modernism in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, in works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and František Kupka, when music and the visual arts were closely allied. Cabral brings these historical alliances up to date with a uniquely urban expression.

Work by the artist will also be on view as part of Victoria Miro Projects’ presentation at this year’s Untitled Art, Miami Beach (Booth A3; 6–10 December 2023).