Roberto Cabot

Dudu Garcia's paintings show us things our age tends to avoid: the passing of time, expressed through the organic quality of whatever has weathered the elements, interacted with them, and been turned into an object, a reified object. His painting shares in the contemplation of the real, in a humility before the event of the real, that we find in the trompe l'oeil of the seicento or in American hyperrealism. The resemblance ends there, however, because Dudu Garcia does not represent reality, he "makes" reality. In a manner close to that of Jorge Luis Borges's character Pierre Menard, who writes Don Quixote without copying it and without "remaking" it. He simply "makes" Cervantes's Quixote.

Dudu Garcia is probably the most American of Rio painters, in tune with a certain young Californian art now gaining ground in the artistic debate of Los Angeles and beyond. I think of artists such as Walead Beshty, who work with an objectivity other than that of classical representation, re-establishing the object in its own essence as object, in a delicate balance between representation and an inverted Duchampian statement. The concrete walls confront us with a factual reality and make us ask how we came to be standing before it. There is something unsettling in these masses of cement, which ought to be far too heavy to hang on walls, and which insist all the same on being masses of concrete, even in suspension.

Dudu Garcia's studio sits in the middle of the largest building site the city has seen in a long time; between the cranes and the cement trucks stand the townhouses of an earlier Rio. Fragments of those houses seem to have found their way into the studio, as has the flow of concrete that announces the new city. Both of these skins of the contemporary Rio fabric meet here.

Roberto Cabot (2014)