EXHIBITION: Yomar Augusto - Embellish

Throughout the history of art, artists have made the process of making itself the subject of their work. From Bruce Nauman's studio performances to William Kentridge's process-driven animations, the question posed by historical giants like Robert Rauschenberg has persisted: is art more real when it comes directly out of the real world? And what, ultimately, is at stake for painting?

Brazilian artist Yomar Augusto's work stitches the fabric of time together — both literally and metaphorically — across the history of contemporary painting, bridging the space between life and art.

Embellish is a collection of collages that invites the viewer to reconsider contemporary painting from a new vantage point. Moving from chaos to order, the works propose that representation is not an illusion — it is physical. The spaces that break or rip in the picture plane push the viewer toward fact and process rather than illusion, questioning the relationship between the artist, the machine, and ownership over the final structural outcome.

These works emphasize and simultaneously critique the mechanical methods of creation that exist beyond the traditional painterly act of mark-making. Passing through destruction and machine-driven reconfiguration — mechanical stitching, mechanical drawing across the picture plane — the works puncture and solidify visual facts gathered separately over a period of five years, transported from continent to continent. The vigor of these works lies in their playful nature. They are rescued from zombie formalism and the coolness of new image painting precisely by this return to play as the governing force.

The painterly mark and the machine stitch are infused with symbolic approaches, harmoniously combined to suggest that although painters inevitably pass through linear trajectories of genres and movements, we ultimately retain the ability to circle back — to adjust scripted truths through a celebration of the act of creating relationships, visual languages and connections where none previously existed.

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