DANIEL BOCCATO
ROT PEAR ROT

13.02.2016 - 20.04.2016



Daniel Boccato for his first exhibition in Madrid with FORMATOCOMODO will present two groups of works:
birdstones and parrotdrawings.

birdstones are flat concrete slabs cast in different forms. each birdstone has two small holes. they stand straight vertically and balance precariously. while grounded by their weight and very present physicality, they seem to float.they become silent-ancient-modernist-cartoon-zen  monuments


surrounded by the warmth of parrots that are listening and coldly echoing their monumental silence.

in contrast to these large gray shapes, the parrotdrawings are very small and colorful and are wall hung. drawings of women and parrots on paper mounted on linen canvases. highly compact and full of explosive energy. like a little saint, the parrot collects secrets confided in him and recites them in his flight. never silent and green.




ROT PEAR ROT
Yara Sonseca



                                                                                                                                                 “In the forest of symbols, which aren’t any,
                                                                                                                The little birds of interpretation, which isn’t any, are never silent.”
                                                                                                                                                                                           Samuel Beckett


Birds and women are the focus of the first exhibition on Daniel Boccato (born Campinas, Brazil, 1991) to be held in Madrid.

 While birds in general are associated with the spiritual, in the case of parrots they have other connotations. Always present in depictions of Eden prior to the existence of Sin, they also appear in oriental harems, guaranteeing the odalisques’ fidelity. This interpretation gave rise to the wings of coloured feathers to be seen in medieval and Early Renaissance depictions of the Archangel Gabriel.

It is as if the messenger arrived disguised as a parrot to pass on the divine message and at the same time to announce to us that this is the new Eve, the model of virtue and the doorway leading back into that Paradise which can no longer be enjoyed on earth.

From those early associations onwards, birds and women have always been iconographically associated, with the former appearing
 as confessors, informers or costly pets in 17^th-century Dutch portraits before reaching their apotheosis in 19^th-century France. We encounter them when Delacroix painted an odalisque, Courbet a dishevelled Venus of doubtful reputation and Manet a virgin-wife seemingly rather bored with being shut up at home.

It is not clear whether Boccato’s parrots were the singing sort, but they undoubtedly took various secrets of the boudoir to the tomb. That avian cemetery full of birds’ eyes has been growing since 2013 when it was presented as a project at the Cooper Union in New York.

Since then there have been losses, and the garden of birds’ funerary monuments has grown and evolved. Its tombstones offer scant information on the deceased but they encourage us to wander around them as if in a maze – like Miró’s at the Fondation Maeght – with the backdrop of the family portraits hanging on the walls. As innocent in appearance as the sculptures they accompany, these rapidly executed, childlike drawings echo those well-kept secrets. Nipples and navels like parrots’ eyes, like holes in stones, look without seeing and expose us as voyeurs. The gaze flies from one form to another, from one hole to the next, repeating without knowing what it repeats, launching the sign into flight, which, now liberated, sings out its truths.


Translated by Laura Suffield