Zé Carlos Garcia

“Tropical”
by Paula Borghi
[about the exhibition “Tropical”, October 2017, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil]

“The meat that I eat today is the flesh that someone will lack tomorrow.” is a sentence presented to Zé Carlos in his dreams since he was a child. Sometimes accompanied by images of amputees. This passage follows the artist in his dreams as well as in his work. I will tell you a story:

In a country side of Rio de Janeiro there was a man who had a pig as a pet. The pig was domesticated from his early age as if a puppy. People from the town thought it was very strange to have a pig as a pet at the same time that they empathised with the man. Eccentric and witty, they saw the humor in treating the pig as a dear member of the family. Years went by and the piglet turned into a hog.

The man had a child, a beautiful little baby. One day, the parents went out and left the baby with the nanny, who at a certain point had to use the toilet. She let the baby on the floor as feeding him. In this interval the hog entered the room and ate the baby’s food, also the baby’s hands and his arms. The hog could have eaten the whole baby if the nanny hadn’t came back in time to save his life. The baby survived, the nanny was beaten and the hog was shot. This is a true Tropical story that guides us towards a possible understanding of this exhibition.

A hog’s head is one operated by the artist through a sculpturing process, changing a beastly face into a humanized one. This work was presented a couple of times being the first one in 2005, subtitled “Severino” and the last one in 2016, as “Pig”. The work criticizes  the Brazilian political scenario of the time. The hog’s head was nicknamed “Leitão”[Piggy]. In 2006, the work was not only the head but also the body which went through a surgically sculpting process to resemble the body of a child. A work that at times focuses on the head while other times focuses on the totality of the body anatomy, which can be presented in coarse salt as an object or it can be cooked and served as food. In this presentation it was cooked and served together with jaboticabas (Brazilian small black fruit).

At the same time as the pig’s head was presented in a frontal position, there was a series of sculptures made with black feathers in the same area. The beauty and the exuberance of each piece are crucial elements to the construction of a narrative that attracts the eye whereas awakens a repulsiveness. In this dichotomy between animal and man, attraction and repulsion, sculpture, dead body and food Zé Carlos produces what disturbs us. Tropical is like the story of the baby who had his arms  eaten by the hog. It bothers us because it awakens thoughts related to moral, ethical, cultural and natural values in its raw shape: death.

“Zé Carlos Garcia”
By Olívia Ardui
[text published in the catalog of the exhibition “Frestas Trienal de Arte”, SESC SP, Sorocaba, Brazil, 2017]

Zé Carlos Garcia’s sculptures present themselves as uncanny shapeshifters that can recombine their members to conjure up different species of insect, or transform pieces of furniture by cloaking them in plumage. This adding-on creates hybrids that not only preserve the meanings of their constituent parts, but also generate morbid curiosities out of distortions of their natures. Garcia seems to want to evince a certain perversity in his audience, caught somewhere between revulsion and fascination, playing on their voyeurism before such mangled bodies, however fictional they may be.

At Frestas, the artist presents a sample of the art he has produced over the last eight years. In the works Cadeira [Chair] and Pássaro [Bird], for example, he explores the formal qualities of the materials and confers upon them a feathery flutter that seems to contradict their sculptural condition by bringing them to bear in all their enigmatic presence. Something similar happens in Ganimedes [Ganymede], a monumental shapeless mass draped in black feathers plonked in the middle of the exhibition space. Not exactly a mantle, not exactly a wing, the work exists in a hybrid corporeality that seems suspended in time, much like Zeus himself, who reigns supreme over the gods at the same time as he abducts the young Ganymede. The Trojan prince was tending to his father’s flocks when he was seen by Zeus. Enchanted by his beauty and spurred by an impulse somewhere between seduction and sadism, the god of gods transformed himself into an eagle and carried the youth off to Olympus to serve as his personal cup-bearer.