“Untitled”

Cabelo is an artist who works with a variety of media. He creates drawings, paintings, engravings, photographs, sculptures, installations, performances, music and poetry. Words and figures are essential elements of his works and are often combined. His creations involve fantastic universes and at the same time refer to poetic situations and political facts.

Compositions on various fabrics, including voile, are common, with figures of singular shapes, often mixed with texts or loose words, which do not necessarily create coherent sentences. They are clues, fragments of drawings, approximations of ideas. The word for Cabelo is also a drawing, a graphic piece to be explored in his constructions. We can find in his works figures that are created from words, as in the case of the work developed for Carbono Galeria, in which figure and writing are confused.

Another essential element in his work is sound. The artist also creates sound compositions in partnership with other musicians, such as on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition " Humúsica" at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, where his heteronym MC Minhoca improvised with DJ Esterco.

Cabelo has had his works exhibited in solo exhibitions, among which the following stand out: " Humusic" , at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (2012); " On the Wings of the Green-Gold Beetle" , at the Marília Razuk Art Gallery, São Paulo (2008); " Myanmar Mirror, The Corridor" , at Art Basel Miami (2006); " Environments of Monte Basura" , at the Centre D'art Santa Monica, Barcelona (2005). Among his group exhibitions are: Mercosul Biennial 2009, Porto Alegre, "Up Close; From Afar" , at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, São Paulo (2008); 26th International Biennial of São Paulo, São Paulo (2004); " Violence and Passion" , at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (2003); " Cote à Cote , Contemporary Art in Brazil" , at the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); " Cephalopod Heptopod" , X Documenta Kassel, at the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (1997).

A notable work in his career is the installation Myanmar Mirror - The Corridor , created at Art Basel Miami in 2006. In it, the artist uses the image of the Burmese twins Johnny and Luther Htoo, who at a very young age were considered to have spiritual powers and went on to lead a guerrilla group in the fight against the dictatorship in Burma (present-day Myanmar), and occupies a container with drawings made on fabric. Images that refer to a setting related to the Eastern universe with figures of Buddha, turtles, monsters and other fantastic characters.

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti comments on the artist: “A cultured artist who does not hide his sources, but is averse to any type of cataloguing. Cabelo is both polyhedral and volcanic. Figures emerge and disappear: fragments of sentences follow one another on the canvas without any ambition to arrive at a complete meaning. As in his performances, the artist does not give the viewer all the keys to reading; he keeps them suspended, one step away from understanding. His narration is an oracular and fragmented superimposition of motifs and ideas.” (Jacopo Crivelli Visconti on the occasion of the installation “Mi casa su casa”, a work by Cabelo at the 26th São Paulo Biennial).