Stephan Doitschinoff, Interventu (detail), 2017, Burnt wood, paraffin, brass, copper and fabric, dimensions variable.
By Daniel Rangel1
Stephan Doitschinoff’s artistic career, marked by deep cyclical immersions, is linked to personal experiences from his childhood. His work is formally influenced by pop art and surrealism and is structured by a unique vocabulary.
Stephan uses a particular iconographic lexicon inspired by historical, religious, political, philosophical and environmental symbols to create drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations. A visual writing loaded with encrypted meanings through a fantastic imaginary literature about contemporaneity.
The artist has not had a solo exhibition in São Paulo since 2013. Over the last few years, he has taken part in group shows in Brazil and abroad, such as the Curitiba Biennial in 2015 and “As Above, So Below. Portals, visions, spirits and mystics”, in 2017, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Ireland, both with themes related to spirituality.
Religious themes have probably been the most explored throughout the history of art. For centuries, sacred writings were the only outlet for artistic creation beyond the search for a faithful reproduction of reality. On the contemporary scene, after being marginalized for some time, the theme is gradually coming back to the fore in the work of leading artists.
In the past, in addition to the religious approach, there was a relationship between art, alchemy and religion, which were considered magical and capable of transforming reality. The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, known for his relationship with Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, used to say that he heard “an inner clunk” while painting. Before him, the non-figurative production of Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint, a figure now considered seminal for the abstract movement, was linked to a spirit that the artist embodied.
Interventu, an installation commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017, is also structured by religious symbols, such as wedding dresses and ex-votos, but here the mixture of appropriated and invented icons intensifies.
The version presented in the exhibition puts the public in direct confrontation with the imagetic alphabet that the artist has been creating in recent years. Another characteristic of the series is the omission of anthropomorphic characters, revealing a ghostly aura that becomes a kind of portal.
New approaches, practices and materials emerge. Wood, paraffin, fabric and brass are used in Interventu and highlight the sculptural dimension of Stephan’s work, which also features some new pieces, offshoots of the series, such as the paraffin books.
The painting Panoptic Wave and the video Marcha ao Cvlto do Fvtvrv, an audiovisual record of one of his performances, complete the show. These works are part of “Cvlto do Fvtvrv”, the artist’s most audacious project, in which he emphasizes, through religious strategies, political issues and those related to post-truth, so present in the current debate.
The works of this artistic enigma continue as mysterious transdisciplinary actions that bring together, in addition to works that belong to the formal universe of art, others in varied media, coming from mass communication, such as marches, social media and even video games.
- Curator and master in visual arts from USP. ↩︎
