A plywood mindscape
This week Henrique Oliveira arrives at Rice for his first solo exhibit in the U.S., and with him he brings most of the salvageable plywood siding from his neighborhood construction sites in Sao Paolo, Brazil.Oliveira, only 35 years old, has found an ingenious and altogether stunning way of presenting the found object medium, plentiful in the surroundings in which he lives. Gathering it at construction sites or among the refuse of shantytown housing, known in Portuguese as favelas, the piles of painted and weathered plywood strips, organized by color, size and texture, covered the floor of the gallery in the weeks preceding the opening. At the audience's feet are what Oliveira calls "the fractured image of a painting" that he began to assemble during the days preceding the exhibit's opening.
