Luiz Roque at Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle

Since the 2000s, Luiz Roque (born in 1979 in Brazil) has been constructing an œuvre firmly rooted in contemporary issues, by steering a course between a primitive past and a future bearing the stamp of science-fiction. Working principally with the moving image, often in Super 8, he takes very great care with the quality of his textures and the aesthetics of his films. From 7 February 2020, Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain is presenting the first major solo exhibition by Luiz Roque in a French institution. The República exhibition brings together a brand new film for 2020 and a selection of works from 2004 to 2019, the whole envisaged as a meandering stroll through the mind of the artist.

The exhibition extends over two floors of the art centre. On the ground floor, four films are being shown, in turn evoking a human-less world dominated by a dog in Zero (2019), a subterranean world where language has been replaced by dance in S (2017), a new sort of monument that unifies instead of magnifying, with O Novo Monumento (2014), and a timeless landscape controlled by a greenhouse in Estufa (2004). In many of his experimentations, Luiz Roque suggests historical characters of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement such as Amílcar de Castro (1920-2002) and Franz Weissmann (1911-2005) who defined art as a living space engaging the spectator. The films shown in the exhibition attain a further degree of physical involvement by extensively including dance.