Zé Tepedino: After Use: At THEOREME Editions, in Paris

Zé Tepedino's practice (Rio de Janeiro, 1990) belongs to the finest tradition of poetics created by reusing elements of reality, celebrating the everyday in its most lyrical form.

Illustrious forebears accompany the artist's research, including the avant-garde that, more than any other, embraced the found object (objet trouvé) as material for imagining forms, mostly sculptural or installation-based, going beyond the simple recovery and reuse of materials: Nouveau Réalisme.

A movement born in Paris and launched by Pierre Restany in 1960 with a group of artists (among them Arman, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely), it declared in a nutshell: "New Realism = new perceptual approaches to the real."

It is precisely from the reality of Rio de Janeiro that Zé Tepedino draws his inspiration. From the Carioca landscape of beaches, rocks, urban settings and tourist landmarks, and even from a confrontation with social inequality, the artist stitches, ties, joins and sets in dialogue the references of a peculiar identity of the city, which he investigates through fragments.

Hangers, umbrella panels, blankets, towels, surfboards, tarps, beach chair fabric and scraps of paper, found on his journeys from home to the studio or during excursions around the metropolis, are manipulated by the artist to bring a new poetic existence to light. A rescue, a second chance at beauty after everyday use.

Zé recounts: "My connection with these materials, such as beach tents, umbrellas and flip-flops, arose from a gradual interest. The canvas parts are what truly capture me. Over time, this material develops a patina, an aging that turns it into something close to painting: I don't see this material as discarded, but as something in another stage of energy. It is these traces, these materialities on the margins, with their histories and potential for transformation, that truly move me."

Thus the shared history of these objects becomes identity, and they bear titles drawn exclusively from the city's own geography: the composition of parts of beach chairs and umbrellas, Grumari, refers to the beach of the same name on the western coast; Nildo 101 is a tribute to the vendor; Ave, created by joining parts of canvas and an umbrella, recalls Lygia Clark's Bichos.

Another fundamental characteristic of Zé Tepedino's object-based poetics is that he works, as he declares, with the possibilities within reach of his arm, that is, maintaining a direct relationship with materials that fit within the artist's field of vision and imagery: "The work is a response to the surroundings; I am almost just a conduit."

This care also reveals an affective component that spreads through the processes: the incorporation of the most authentic soul of Rio. Just as Marcel Duchamp had encapsulated the Air de Paris (1919) in the ampoule given to his friend and patron Walter C. Arensberg, Zé Tepedino gifts us the breath of the Carioca landscape beyond the postcards, through a distinctive production that is full of style and utterly unique. The dimensions of the works, moreover, are always at real scale: "Working within the limits of the original object is important to bring forth an affirmation of the essence of things," the artist emphasizes.

Finally, in After Use, a dialogue is created between the Cidade Maravilhosa and the Ville Lumière: in both, the atmosphere itself and the very surfaces are transformed into emblematic marks. Carioca spirit overflows, with its colors and the beauty of unexpected forms, into the Parisian setting: it is the moment of ideal encounter between the Brazilian walker and the flâneur, both reclaiming the simultaneously enchanted and spontaneous portraits of the city, performing a post-production on them and anticipating a poetic reprogramming, in order to learn to dwell beyond hegemony and in freedom.