Ana Frango Elétrico is the tenth guest of “Closer to PIPA: the artist speaks in the Institute collection”. Every fifteen days we select an art piece that was acquired by the Institute and ask the artist to talk a little bit about the work: be it the creative process; the ideia behind the piece; how it connects with the artist’s production; or any other aspect the person would like to share. The goal is to bring the audience closer to the artist’s universe and to the “Displacement” collection from the PIPA Institute, which was established in 2010 to support, help document and promote the development of Brazilian contemporary art, and which has the Prize as one of its initiatives. This time, we chose the works “Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez I” (I Was With You During This Chess Match I) and “Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez IV” ( I Was With You During This Chess Match IV), currently on display in the group show “Recent Acquisitions: PIPA Institute Collection”, which is taking place at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, at the Praça dos Arcos gallery, since September 9th and until November 20th.
Ana Frango Elétrico is a Brazilian songwriter, poet, visual artist and musical producer. Since 2015, she has researched ordinary day to day elements, saturating reality into graphic, poetic and sonorous forms. She has also released two albums of original music, “Mormaço Queima” and “Little Electric Chicken Heart”, and a catalogue book called “Escoliose: paralelismo miúdo” (Scoliosis: minuscule parallelism). The book is composed of poems, pictures and illustrations made between 2015 and 2019, in which she assimilates diverse techniques and poetry to compose one of the key concepts of her work, entitled “paralelismo miúdo”.
As explained by Heloisa Buarque de Holanda in the book’s afterword,
“It is about a poetry with another kind of generational DNA, an almost insolent DNA, that, radically going towards personal and located testimony, demystifies any and all poetic aura (at least those of the noble times of the masculine canons) in favor of corporal liberation, libertary”.
“Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez I” (I Was With You During This Chess Match I), 2021, print on velvet, 1 x 1 m, PIPA Institute collection
Check out below what the artist told us about the artworks:
“Te acompanhei nesse xadrez I e IV (I Was With You During This Chess Match I and IV) are part of a series of prints and paintings that arise from a musical rhythmic thinking related to standardization and programming. Concerning these two works, I aim to obtain texture and plasticity using velvet.
I try to propose a vertigo and a magnetic or sound wave from the disorder or slight asymmetry of ordinary symbols and forms”.
“Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez IV” ( I Was With You During This Chess Match IV), 2021, print on velvet, 80 x 80 cm, PIPA Institute collection
In your videointerview for PIPA 2021, you mentioned that you incorporate elements of nostalgia in some of your works, as well as sounds of other decades in your music. Does “Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez IV” (I Was With You During This Chess Match IV) have any relation to the 2000’s? With the pop-punk, which had an aesthetic strongly represented by the singer Avril Lavigne, for instance?
Ana: I do believe there’s a connection with the 2000’s, but much more with cartoon than with the post-punk. Chromatic, narratively and scenically, it draws from cartoons like Cow and Chicken, Dexter’s Laboratory etc. I feel like, to me, the series “Te Acompanhei Nesse Xadrez” (I Was With You During This Chess Match) is a musical link between the 80’s and the 2000’s, in which pop art is also a strong reference.
Your works recently acquired by the PIPA Institute are now part of the “Displacement” collection, which, as the name indicates, gathers multiple types of displacements in Brazilian contemporary art. Thinking about that – and about the fact that you are a multimedia artist, who works with music, text and visual arts –, in which way does this type of art enter your production to complement it?
Ana: I feel that at all times I’m thinking about music in aesthetic terms and about graphic arts in musical terms. I feel like my goal is this combined work. Not that it doesn’t show up in the works individually, my goal is this joint and fast creative reasoning of aesthetics.
“Nobody Sings Happy Birthday To Jesus Christ On Christmas”, 2017, acrylic and silver tape on canvas, 30 x 30 cm, PIPA Institute collection
When Ana was nominated for PIPA 2021, she recorded a videointerview exclusively produced for the Prize by Do Rio Filmes. In her speech, Ana addressed her research that deals with music and graphic arts, where she “uses ordinary elements of the capitalist West” and incorporates influences from her childhood, building works that are also marked by synesthesia:
To visit the artist’s page on PIPA Institute’s website, click here.
Got interested in the works and is around Rio de Janeiro? Come see it in person alongside other artworks from the PIPA Institute collection. Beyond this exhibition, there is also the PIPA Prize 2020: Winners Show and PIPA Prize 2021: Presenting the Shortlisted Artists.