«Nothing is transmissible but thought, the fruit of our labors.»
Le Corbusier, July 1965

«We are destroying the wall as the resting place for their pictures.»
El Lissitzy

The methodological essence of Rodrigo Oliveira's work is the synecdoque: the whole (the cosmos, material life, mass culture, Fordist serialization, modernist non-objectivity, functionalism, hygienism, art history, merchandise as “phantasmagoria”, poetics as a census of pressing everyday life) is condensed into the part (the work) and is restored to its condition of experience.

In Rodrigo Oliveira's work, the object is understood as a flow where the specific properties of each of the manifestations of visual culture converge, which here adds modernism - in all its breadth - to the image and to the non-artistic materiality, i.e., all the material that is spare and available for appropriation. There is a sensory shift, the objects refer us to the modernist symbolic and pictorial revolution (the redemptive vision of the artistic field as overcoming conventions and the greatest of them all: mimesis) and at the same time they divert to other processes of ambiguous existence of materials. “(...) Thousands of times I thought that non-objectivity should be praised because thanks to it we began to “see” masses of new objects, of objects that may even be old, ordinary but whose extraordinary qualities remained hidden, ignored.”¹

These words that Aleksander Rodchenko put in his diary as a confessional tribute to cubo-futurism seem to have been written to also include the here and now of Rodrigo Oliveira's work. Thus, we found that the works present here are pure conservation of energy ready to become an effect and cause by this succession, just as a boulder placed on the roof of a house awaits its opportunity to leave the limbo of Dead Labour and become kinetic.

¹ RODCHENKO, Alexander. (Alexander Lavrentiev Ed. ), Experiments for the Future — Diaries, essays, letters, and other writings, New York: MoMA, 2005, p.106.