Leonardo Kossoy: Mergulhador
Bienal de Curitiba 2018
October 18, 2018—March 10, 2019



Download exhibition booklet [pdf]

Leonardo Kossoy is a guest artist at the 25th anniversary commemoration of the Curitiba Biennial in 2018. He has also been called harbinger of the upcoming biennial, to be held in 2019, the theme of which is Open Borders.
Kossoy’s artistic sensibility and notion pushes back the boundaries of reality: rather than a purely objective process, the recognition and lived experience of reality involves a wide margin of subjectivity. Sooner than comprising mirror images, his oeuvre is a mirror in which viewers continuously recognize themselves by feeling, rather than just seeing. From behind his photo or video lens, Kossoy has been honing his vision like a traveling artist looking for new territories to be explored by his creative work, his unconscious and his comprehension – a deep plunge into his existence, unveiling its knowns and unknowns.

This exhibition features four distinct series from various periods of Kossoy’s artistic career, two of them shown here for the first time. Upon entering the gallery, visitors come face-to-face with Caindo no Inferno da Imagem [Falling into imagery inferno] with its shifting, hazy and distorted images ranging from abstract to figurative. They guide visitors along a narrative never before seen in Kossoy's oeuvre, a reflection on the tyranny of images to which artists are bound. The excess and intensity of images take over the mind of their creator immersed, particularly, in the commitment of transposing them to viewers legibly, while remaining true to artistic authenticity.

Across the way, Waterscapes features isolated waterscapes and interventions in urban spaces, in which the transparency, motion, depth and surface of water are shown as both seductive and crucial attributes. Even the represented absence of water in a neglected pool, or the body of water reddened by a predator's action reveal its existence enhanced in Kossoy’s inventory.

Inventário do Mundo [World inventory] is an excellent compendium of themes, shapes, colors and lights. The individual groups within this work have been titled Passando (passing), Fonte de Luz (light source), Paredes (outer and inner walls), Escadas (stairs), Quase Retratos (quasi-portraits) and Perspectivas (perspectives). The outcome is a tangle of interconnected bits of data that Kossoy likens to energized particles such as those inside atoms – a metaphor for the way people compile inventories of their own worlds.

The exhibition ends with Only You, a video designed and directed by Leonardo Kossoy in which two protagonists transpose and transgress the barriers of the unconscious. In their performance, the couple reveals the angsts, anxieties, sensibilities and ambitions of human relationships shared in a secluded place with no boundaries – other than existential ones.

Tereza de Arruda, curator
Berlin, September 2018



Bienal de Curitiba 2018 [visit website]
Exhibition period: October 18, 2018—March 10, 2019