Vanderlei Lopes

Vanderlei Lopes’ artistic practice runs through a trajectory of experimentation with various supports that culminate in sculptures, objects or situations stamped from everyday life, transformed, and perpetuated in materials such as gunpowder, gold, ceramics, bronze or sound. The work for Usina de Arte features the model of an empty arena carved from its top. The rings on the trunk of a tree are records of its lifetime, evidence of the duration that constitutes it as a tree, a natural element. The arenas, architectural constructions made from classical Greece, made to accommodate many people in order to watch presentations of all kinds, are seminal elements built by culture. The work relates the cut to the cultural construction, to the civilizing event. The empty theater is an allusion to the social stage where events and everyday activities echo and unfold. The stairs present, both to access the work, and those represented inside the arena, are articulated between the physical experimentation to access the work and the one represented, inside the Arena. Between the passage from something experienced physically to something envisioned, through representation, virtually inside the sculpture. Vanderlei Lopes,1973, born in Terra Boa. PR. Brazil lives and works in São Paulo,