“Untitled”

The mediation between body and environment, whether natural or built, is the central theme of Nino Cais' work, and his means of expression are drawing, objects, collage, photography and installation. He has a degree in fine arts from Faculdade Santa Marcelina (Fasm). He has exhibited his work individually at Paço das Artes (Project Season), Centro Cultural São Paulo (Exhibition Program), Fundação Nacional de Arte (Funarte - SP) and collectively at the Metropolitan Pavillon (New York), the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Itaú Cultural, among other spaces. In 2005, he was mapped by Rumos Artes Visivos and in 2008, he received the Destaque Award from Fundação Iberê Camargo and the Acquisition Award from Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto. His work is in collections such as MAM-BA, MARP and SESC.

Bodies are the basic elements of Nino Cais's investigation. The human and material bodies. The artist analyzes each of them and the relationships between them. These relationships also involve the places around his characters and their objects.

There is a constant interplay between the man treated as an object, or even as a sculpture, and the object as an intermediary between body and space. In several photographic works, Nino sometimes hides himself, sometimes exposes himself. When he reveals himself, he seems to want to be mediated by utensils and tools, as in Maiastra (2007), or in Untitled (2004), in which Nino's figure appears twice, in different positions, separated by a wall, glasses, cups, milk jugs and buckets (all duplicated). And when his face is covered, he becomes equal to the props that make up the image, merging with them.

In other works, these already volumetric, the artist investigates things, not only in formal aspects, but also in their symbologies, and brings them closer together. What would a chair with sickle feet be? Or with shovel feet?

An interesting aspect of Nino's work is that the images are always composed of multiple elements. There is constantly the addition of fragments in a single field, the collage and overlapping of several pieces and all of them, one by one, are important for the construction of the final figure. In the Décor series, the characters, always faceless, are taken by pieces that serve as an instrument of identification. However, such collages do not only seek to indicate which object is part of which specific character, but to create typical images of an entire decade.

Although the historical basis is very present in the artist's works, his story is never official; it is just stories. Nino Cais transports us to different times, to different moments in history, which we recreate according to our experiences and memories. Nino invents worlds in which he constructs objects, characters and the order between them. They are fantastic stories, personal narratives that are at the same time open to multiple possibilities. They are works on the verge of movement, which are paralyzed almost like a film frame.

In "Education through Objects", Agnaldo Farias makes an intriguing statement about his work: "What kind of world is this that Nino Cais invented? Are objects the instruments for capturing a hidden reality and the use of new syntaxes among them the trigger for new spaces and, with them, new possibilities for our body? The fact is that, in this world of scarce experiences, what can our body bring in the form of memory? The need to reinvent it necessarily involves re-educating our gestures and actions, so that we can once again receive other lessons from things, the same things as always."1

1. FARIAS, Agnaldo. Education through objects. Source: http://www.centralgaleriadearte.com/a_cais/textos.php