May 25 / May 28, 2023

For the 2023 edition of Arco Lisboa, NVS presents a dialogue between the works of thenovel Portuguese collective Look Kool (Tomás Henríquez, 2003 and Tomás Tomás, 2001) and the Argentine artist Matías Ercole (1987) made especially for the occasion drawn from the stand’s architecture and spatial characteristics. Within the fairs theme, NVS wants to visibilize and embody different instances of sociability linked to the creation process by artists of different trajectories and how we are accompanying and supporting each other within our community, challenging and rethinking artistic education.

This is the first public appearance of Look Kool and they present an installation of a series of white sculptural pieces that seeks to contain the expanded experience of the wall. Their forms are the evolution of shapes and letters that refer to the code and vocabulary of signs of tagging and his own painting; which is housed, in general and up until now, mostly in open, abandoned or disused spaces within the city.

On his part, Matías Ercole presents installative drawings in ink and wax, with a central piece that becomes a working door within the stand. These works are part of his current line of work and research around light as a physical phenomenon but also as a both character and symbol, linked to history and different geographies. On this occasion the image of the sun is the protagonist.
Look Kool searches for shapes and symbols inspired by details that go unnoticed in everyday life. Its members share their fascination for painting, large scale and urban life, and this mutual interest allows them to channel the collective and individual power of thought when separated by distance. They are interested in synthesizing, resorting to the economy of resources and the urgency of the performativity of painting as something playful, adapting to the space that surrounds it.
In Ercole ́s work, the landscape is the central iconography in which his research takes place. In his latest works, the light becomes “rare”. A light that the artist thinks is typical of his geographies. Hallucinated, valuing what is outside of herself, contrasting logics that are found, between ideas of ecstasy, madness and exoticism. These images are presented to us as if the architecture were a literal display of the painting, so that the observer no longer contemplates the painting as something external to him, but sees it from within.