Caio Reisewitz’s latest exhibition, “World in Between,” responds to a time when many Western societies are struggling with political polarization and demanding truly global collaboration to address issues with transnational consequences – the most pressing being the environmental crisis. The artist has built his practice using photography to probe the relationship between nature, architecture and human activity. Since the early 2000s, Reisewitz has focused much of his research on modernist architecture in Brazil, examples of which appear frequently in his images. For this exhibition, the artist has invested plants in the common areas of a former residential building of Rino Levi, which now houses Luciana Brito Galeria. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors to Burle Marx’s landscaped patios were left open, creating a seamless indoor-outdoor environment. On the walls, photographs Anapu And Cutuaboth from 2018, which were taken in a Brazilian forest before the area was flooded to create the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, echo the traces of a landscape that was neither separate nor integrated, but engulfed in a way anthropogenic.
In the appendix, two landscapes made from superimposed photographs, Papudahu And Taggingaboth from 2023, keep company with two close-ups on the water: Janahy2023, in shades of old rose, and Jaguaratema2023, in saturated greens that could easily be read as mineral or arboreal. Arapehy, 2023, frames a group of intertwined tree branches and roots beside a stream so that they look like a simple building skeleton. At one end of the room, world do meio (world in between) 2023, a large in situ adhesive photographic collage composed of several cut-outs of organic shapes, opposes a window overlooking a tiny winter garden.
Reisewitz’s metaphorical “in-between world” is highlighted by the photographer’s play with layers and contrasts: inner and outer, past and present, abstract and figurative, real and figurative, natural and man-made, connected and isolated. The resulting exhibition is a testament to the power and beauty of nuance and ambiguity. In a climate of intensified extremes, the artist pleads for the exploration of common ground.
