PRESS CLIPPINGS

In All this for nothing, André Felipe conducts a visual investigation that shifts among graphic design, conceptual art and abstraction. The show reflects maturity in the artist’s recent production, promoting a provocative dialogue between shape and meaning.

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Abstraction appears as a confrontational act here. André dismembers the elements and clichés of the contemporary visual culture, leaving its context and creating reflection and discomfort. The paper, with its materiality and fragility, takes the protagonist role, highlighting its physicality while contrasting with the immateriality of the digital world.

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The typographic rigor, the horizontal clippings, and the solid colors compose a visual vocabulary that seems to search for the artistic practice’s essence. But is there really a single essence? Between clippings and displacements, André Felipe’s work leads us to question this pursuit. While trying to reach the absolute, his practice is constructive and devoid of moralism, as it frees the artwork of any narrative while affirming its autonomous entity.

 

In the intersection of language, consumption and ideology, André’s work defies the border between art and communication. His artworks not only participate in the contemporary debate but also enhance it, retrieving the image’s subversive load. This motion echoes appropriation practices, commercial graphic design, and institutional critics. While taking elements from publicity and mass visual culture, his work destabilizes normative speech as it is drained of its original role, transforming it into vehicles of irony, critic, and re-significance.

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All this for nothing manifests the refusal of commercial design’s utilitarianism and empty aesthetics. When void of a role or direct message, his work returns to art its strength as a political and social act, emerging from the tension amidst shape and concept, the beauty and nothing.

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What’s left of the image when we remove it from its commercial function? André Felipe presents this debate with authority.

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Eduardo Saretta

(free translation)