Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present In Lines and Realignments, a group exhibition curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Thom O’Nions.

The exhibition brings together the work of seven artists currently living and working in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro along with documentation of a work by Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles. The exhibition's starting point is Meireles' work O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux (The Sermon on the Mount: Let There Be Light), which took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1979 as a twenty-four hour performance event. This piece consists of a mirrored basement room with a floor covered in sandpaper, on the sandpaper sits a pile of 126,000 matchboxes watched over by a group of security guards. On the surfaces of the mirrors are phrases taken from the Sermon on the Mount, as described in the Gospel of Matthew. The work lies somewhere between a sculpture and a performance, its essential quality being its potential for activation, its latent sense of precariousness and imminent transformation.

The exhibition gathers a set of works around these ideas of suspended action, artwork that exists on the cusp of change or transformation. The works in the exhibition embody ideas of performance whilst simultaneously remaining fixed.

Marcius Galan's practice involves the construction of installations, objects and videos that deal with ideas of geometry and balance, often using this as a way of framing social, political and economic conditions. His work in the exhibition consists of a site specific installation of nails in the wall that produces a diaphanous construction of light and shadow, hovering between presence and absence. This oscillation between light and shadow also occurs in Nicolas Robbio's work in which a projection of a window blind occupies a section of the wall, an imaginary threshold that is both an image and a physical presence in the room.

Renata Lucas works site specifically, her pieces being carefully considered responses to the spaces they occupy. Often disrupting or altering the viewer's movement through the exhibition space they seek to reframe spectatorship, producing a different awareness of space. This questioning of the viewer and their movement within the exhibition space is also a key concern of Roberto Winter, whose work in the exhibition puts forward an imaginary weight of the room, inverting an inversion originally made by Piero Manzoni in his piece Socle du Monde from 1961.

Carla Zaccagnini's work addresses our interaction with the world, extending the exhibition to the streets surrounding the gallery. The work proposes a different form of attention to street signs, finding moments of unintended meaning by removing letters from the street names. The piece is anchored in the gallery with a wall text and the viewer invited to take away a set of stickers for altering the nearby signs, suggesting an array of possibilities for reimagining the texts of the city.

Adriano Costa's work deals with the physicality of the world, animating materials to reveal a shared physical quality with the viewer. These ideas also circulate within André Komatsu's practice. His work navigates a sense of measurement, how we construct systems of understanding and of quantification to help us deal with a disordered and ultimately chaotic world.

Image: Documentation of Cildo Meireles’ O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux, 1979
Courtesy of the artist; Photograph by Luiz Alphonsus