PRESENTATION: OSGEMEOS-In the Corner of the Mind
OSGEMEOS (Portuguese for “the twins”) is the professional name of the Brazilian artists and twin brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who were born in São Paulo in 1974. Like many twins, as children they had a special way of playing and communicating with each other, which included constantly making drawings (they say this was like a religion to them, with drawing as a form of prayer). This synchronicity continued as they started creating graffiti together in São Paulo in 1986, inspired in part by the international explosion of graffiti and hip-hop culture that had reached Brazil by the mid-1980s.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
As OSGEMEOS’s ideas and skills developed through the 1990s and 2000s, their imagery became increasingly complex, merging elements from Brazilian folk culture, seaside and urban scenes, festivals, and music into their compositions. Still working in harmony with each other, even to the point of having shared dreams that inspire their imagery, they create paintings, murals, sculptures, installations, and videos that portray a vivid world of colorful patterns and fantastic characters and settings. Rich with symbols and signs that tease the viewer into the temptation to interpret, at core these works are reflections of the artists’ desire for the “ludic” a word used by psychologists to describe childhood experiences of spontaneous play. Antidotes to the ordinary, these whimsical inventions are meant to be both exotic and accessible to a wide audience; the artists intend to open “a window to the place that you can see yourself, you can see the pure imagination alive, you can see a colorful sky, a magical place… OSGEMEOS present a new body of work in their solo exhibition “In the Corner of the Mind”. Throughout this new body of work the artists give space and form to their vivid inner worlds, and the works collapse distinctions between body, architecture, sacred geometry, and landscape to create a universe where the self fantastically converges with the wider world. In “No canto do pensamento / In the corner of the mind” (all works 2022), a head-shaped structure emerges from the landscape to offer shelter to a woman, while in “Vagalume / Firefly”, the lone figure’s dress doubles as a building, its folds revealing towers and doors. Defying conventions of perspectival space, OSGEMEOS’ works complicate notions of figure and ground; in “O canto do pássaro / The bird’s song” the central figure’s hat depicts a fantastical landscape, as if another universe is springing forth from the subject’s head. The work’s striped, brightly-colored background recalls the geometric compositions of Frank Stella or the vibrant surfaces of Op art. Across OSGEMEOS’ patterned surface, the central figure’s limbs cast long shadows, and the artists’ geometric worlds reveal traces of their inhabitants at every turn. Reflecting the duo’s expertise in a variety of painting techniques and artistic languages, the works in the exhibition blend muralism, graffiti, and traditional painting practices to thwart distinctions between interiority and exteriority, figure and ground, and self and world. Representing their dreamlike universe, OSGEMEOS consider space an expansive term that simultaneously encompasses both the public sphere and inner fantasy.
Photo: OSGEMEOS, O Canto da Sereia (Mermaid Singing), 2016, Mixed media and sequins, 74.41 x 109.84 x 5.51 inches, 189 x 279 x 14 cm, © OSGEMEOS, courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin Gallery
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 4/5-18/6/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/
