26/11/2019 – 24/5/2020

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Pardo é Papel (Brown is Paper), an individual exhibition by Maxwell Alexandre, is received by the Rio Art Museum and the Odeon Institute as a reaffirmation of the vocation that MAR has achieved in six years of existence. Facing the mirror, recognizing oneself, listening, affirming what matters and moving forward. These are tasks for a museum that dialogues with a city and its neighborhood. What heritage do we want to strengthen?
Maxwell Alexandre, a young carioca painter who lives in Rocinha, elaborates a reflection on a color, a fact that is more than recurrent in the history of art, which sees in form and color elements of its own language. However, here, the color brown is re-signified by the artist, taking us in other directions. By producing self-portraits on brown paper, MW (the artist’s signature) becomes aware that he is also facing a political act: painting black bodies on brown paper. Stigmas are assumed and reversed. The color of black skin, mixed with the color of the paper, returns as a condition of resistance, as a reaction: “brown is paper”. Thus, art and culture, form and subjectivity are brought together.
By bringing this itinerancy, a museum like MAR ratifies the ways, sensations and places with which we are interested in dialoguing: the school, the recreation, the museum, the makeshift rooftop, the family room, the street, the church. All this is presented in the artist’s paintings. The museum, then, is rethought as a sign of distinction, and inclusion becomes a goal in it. Historically a place of ostentation of goods, the museum that interests us must continue to reverse the peripheralization, transforming it into self-esteem. And, above all, it must accept the plethora of colors already more than experienced by the city that rethinks itself every day, in the fight, in the sky-blue of school uniforms and patterns of the pools where we amuse ourselves on Sundays.
To think museum. To think city.