Marcos Chaves (born 1961, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian contemporary artist.
Art practice
Marcos Chaves' art practice has been evolving since the 1980s throughout a range of works and projects spanning across media and mediums, including text, sound and video installations, assemblages, photography and site-specific projects. Mostly known and recognized through gestures of appropriation and intervention, Chaves searches for different meanings, or manoeuvres the existing ones inherent to objects, words and life-situations. His work extracts poetry and alternative representations by shifting the values of ordinary, everyday objects, landscapes and words.
“Marcos Chaves surprises meanings and values that are immersed in vulgar things, dissimulated by habit or convention. He makes unpredictable displacements and produces assemblages in a tone of parody distilling his acute observations of the world, from technology to rubbish.” writes Brazilian art-critic Ligia Canongia
Early life and education
Marcos Chaves was born in Rio de Janeiro in January 1961 as the youngest of seven children. He grew up in the neighborhood of Santa Teresa where he continues to have his studio. As a teenager, he was very close to his aunt, Mara Chaves who worked for the architects Wilson Reis Netto and ; this triggered his training in architecture and urbanism (1979) at Universidade Santa Ursula where he attended classes with Lygia Pape who had an important influence on him. He also took classes at the Visual Arts School of Parque Lage where many of his peers taught or trained, and at the Museo de Arte Moderna where Rubens Gerchman taught him painting.
In 1984, he traveled to Italy and studied art history while working as an assistant with the Italian comic artist and satirist Francesco Tullio Altan. It was from Altan from whom he learnt the value of direct humor which one finds in most of Chaves' works. While in Italy, he met Antonio Dias, an influential figure in Brazilian contemporary art, who invited him to work as his assistant in Milan. During this period he was introduced to Arte Povera artists and aesthetics, another inspiration for his later work.
Upon his return to Brazil in 1985, he met , a major artist in the Brazilian scene with whom he began a regular dialogue about art. Together they experimented with four-hands paintings. During this period, Chaves developed a studio practice and started working on his first assemblages and object-based works, shifting his interest from painting to what has shaped his current conceptual, language and text-based, and photographic practice.
Important works
Eu Só Vendo A vista, 1997 (Conceptual photography)
Marcos Chaves' most notable photographic work, Eu só vendo a vista (1997), takes as its main subject Rio de Janeiro's iconic view of the Sugar Loaf mountain found on tourist postcards and collectively associated to the landscape of the city. This view, shot from a very traditional angle becomes almost invisible for having been overly represented and used.
As an attempt to restore a relationship with it, Chaves takes this image to the field of art and transposes onto it a sentence which holds many semantic ambiguities: Eu só vendo a vista.
Playing around the words vista (view, eyesight), the meaning of the expression à vista (cash) as well as vendo (depending on the conjugation means selling, seeing, and concealing) one could read the different sentences:
Eu só vendo a vista = I only sell the view
Eu só vendo à vista = I only sell for cash
Eu só, vendo a vista (with an added comma) = I alone or lonely, see the view. Só eu vendo a vista (words swapped) = Only I sell the view / sight
This apparently simple yet highly charged conceptual work holds within it, strong statements and criticism about art, photography and the position of an artist in society, including within the art and photography fields ruled by market transactions of selling and buying views on/ of the world.
By questioning the meaning of overselling Rio de Janeiro's iconic view to mere merchandise (on postcards), Chaves asserts his ownership and power to sell that view as an artist.