“#1|#1 (The Landscape Earth Passage Frame)”

A draftsman, scholar of the History of Art and Theater, and philosopher, Marco Veloso expresses himself in two dimensions, whether through lines or words. In many cases, his drawings communicate an avalanche of ideas, in one or multiple cutouts. His works have been exhibited at the Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro), Oi Futuro (Rio de Janeiro), the Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói. His works are included in important collections such as the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection (Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro).

In 1977, he began studying drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro under the guidance of neo-concrete artist Aluísio Carvão. Drawing has always been a part of his life, but it only really became his job in 1995. In the interim period, Marco worked on a variety of projects: he studied Political Science at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and soon became involved in professional activities related to theater. He wrote scripts for plays, was a reporter and critic of theater and visual arts, and was a judge for important artistic awards such as the Special Events of the XIX Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1989. He completed a master's degree in philosophy of art at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in the area of ​​Art History and during that time, he taught courses at Parque Lage. In 1995, he worked in collaboration with the artist Artur Barrio, and from that moment on, Marco Veloso never stopped producing as a visual artist. “Drawing as a way of life,” reflects the artist.

Drawing is his means of expression and through lines, Marco does not create figures or shapes, but fissures in the space of the paper, delimiting areas that he calls “tonalities”: “... the line is created on the plane and makes an inner light emerge from the drawing”. In this way, the artist constructs, within the limits of his paintings, spatial delimitations that make objects, figurative or abstract, emerge.

There is also a fine line between figurative art and abstraction in the artist's work. We can often identify formal elements of the alphabet common to all, however, these soon mix with lines that create unusual compositions. Sometimes, these elements give us the impression of being familiar, but they are not. His spaces have a connection with visible spaces, but they do not stick to them, they depart from them to create a new, independent and unique creation. Could this confusion be a reflection of experiments using automatic methods to decondition the gaze? Could deconditioning have in fact been impregnated in Marco's production, in such a way as to make spatial freedom something natural in his work?

As the poet and philosopher Antonio Cícero states on the occasion of Marco Veloso's solo exhibition at Galeria Artur Fidalgo in 2005: “Each series of drawings by Marco Veloso seems to result from an archeo-phenomenological excavation of memory, bringing to light fragments with which the dense mystery of an unexpectedly playful discovery of the world is reconstructed.”