Rogerio Mesquita

Carnaval is the biggest popular festivity in Brazil.  It is a beautiful and unbelievable show, specially in the city of Rio de Janeiro.  Four days when people forget who they really are, how they really live and how hard life is in a country where the gap between the rich and the poor is huge. Sixteen million people still live under absolute misery, there are 64,000 homicides per year, a number only overlapped by the Syrian war. Public health and education are far from acceptable and corruption is soaring.  

Through the deconstruction of bliss and usage of beautiful colors, I try to juxtapose the contrast in which the Brazilian society is trapped. A portrait of my anguish from experiencing this endless struggle.

The duo Ludovic Thiriez and Rogerio Mesquita exhibits a series of paintings over photographs that plays and confronts issues of identity and culture that populates the collective imagination of an exotic tropical paradise.

Ludovic, as a traveler-artist, spent 2 years living in Sao Paulo. Through a tension between a thoughtful and a floating look, the artist collects and documents symbols, sensations, experiences and paint them over Mesquita’s pictures.

Rogerio has a long story photographing top models in Brazil mostly for advertising campaigns and fashion magazines. The portraits for this series comprise a unique cataloging of the contemporary ruling beauty.He captures an apathic disembodiment of the exuberant and plenty, which is often associated with the fashion industry. Trapped in the absence of advertising, the seminude toneless bodies incarnate and return to the tropical nature through Ludovic’s strokes.

Through Mesquita’s photographs we experiment the absolute certainty that we are condemned by time.  Certainty that we try to disguise with the help of risky beliefs and helpless actions. Certainty that resists silently through our noisy denial. Certainty that we are absolutely alone and drifting with our own selves.  We, that are our best and yet worst company.