STATEMENT OF WORK

Alexandre Camarao is a compulsive collector whose work is based on the aggregation of images, sounds, and words, and on the appropriation of multiple references such as art history, mythology, decorative arts, design and music, oscillating between elements of pop and erudite culture, without hierarchies or erasures. This methodology is, rather than an accumulation, an extension of thought.
He works with digital images, absorbing the excess of visuality and transforming the noise of social networks into vibrant and lively archives that resemble visual diagrams and serve as the basis for drawings, collages, paintings and tapestries. This work cannot be read without taking into account Alexandre's activity as a musician, which contaminates all his visual interventions, manifested in several ways, including in a, sometimes, rhythmic origin to his compositions.
Since his last artistic residency in LA, Alexandre has been exploring the visual and graphic elements of words, including in the meanings themselves, in font design, text visuality, music lyrics, and phonetics following the basis of Concrete Poetry begun in Brazil - a country which shares strong cultural ties to Portugal. These elements and issues are reflected and explored in tapestry methodologies and techniques, their rhythms, differentiated velocities and materiality.

The main focus here is to investigate how different disciplinary practices can bring together new ways of thinking about drawing and how this thinking can specifically inform the practice of tapestry and its drawing process. A line of fabric can work as a metaphor for the simple act of drawing a line on a piece of paper. The line, in tapestry, projects the drawing but at the same time creates its materiality, literally.
By means of example, the way most music is produced today, through a precise and continuous repetition of sounds, loops and the use of stutter effects, in addition to being similar to the tapestry techniques, contributes to a metamorphosis of lyrics and their formal and phonetic characteristics. In recent tapestry work Camarao have been using material from musicians such as DJ Rashad, Robyn or the Brazilian singer Gal Costa, but also from artists/designers such as the New Yorker Ben Duvall and the Portuguese duo Sara & André.