III. Exhibition
BR / 2021
FASHION + ARTS + POLITICS, Galeria Mario Cohen
"Seamstress mother and grandmother helped to fabricate Marcos' childhood universe. After playing with sewing machines, drawing, painting, carpentry, sculpture and photography emerged with the urgent need to express his lyrical perception of his surroundings. An out-of-focus photograph taken by his brother got the boy Kelvin interested in that device that could reproduce the world as his myopia made him see it. This fascination would be joined, years later, by political and identity issues discussed at journalism school. When the two met, there was a meeting between lyricism and a keen critical observation of the contemporary world.
Marcos and Kelvin became the artistic duo MAR+VIN. In recent years they have made photographic creations that equate and renew the fashion-art-politics triad. With the aim of making a debate about inclusion and giving a leading role to the minority majority by a perverse system that aims to maintain the status quo of Brazil's patriarchal and racist society, Mar + Vin strike a blow against distorted tradition with elegance, power and radical beauty.
If the field of fashion in Brazil has always been permeated by the representation and aesthetic strategies inherited from the European colonizers, the duo invests against this deviation and investigates in depth the roots of the formation of the national character, carrying out a crusade through Brazilian territory, like Macunaíma in search of his muiraquita. From this journey through the roots of the Brazilian people, blackness emerges in its splendor, as well as references to the original peoples of this gleba. Added to this is an urgent discussion that breaks down the boundaries that demarcate gender issues. To heal the infertile land of Serra Pelada (2018), after the exploitation of gold with the use of mercury, MAR+VIN gave birth in the region to an entity that encompasses various Brazilian religious matrices. In the paint "Marcelo" (2019), a kind of herald of the creation of the Earth is superimposed on an idyllic landscape, with extinct species and juxtaposed biomes, as if proposing the rediscovery of the Land of Pau Brasil. Is it possible to rethink the structure of a culture, to eliminate its hierarchical vices, its stigmas and stereotypes? MAR+VIN and his art tell us that we have to invest all our hope in this to purge the curse until one day, who knows, we can rest from these clashes in the lap of a black Pietá (2020) that stares at the future we have built for the new generations".
Eder Chiodetto
