Pedro Pires | Doppelgänger

Gallery MOMO Johannesburg is proud to announce Pedro Pires’ first exhibition entitled Doppelgänger. Milica Zivkovic (2000:120) explains that the doppelgänger “is not ‘outside’ time but produced within and determined by its social context”.  This statement by Zivkovic resonates with Pires’ current body of work created while on residency in Johannesburg at Gallery MOMO.  The title refers to a possible/proposed identity that the sculptures and drawings have; representing a view of social contexts in Johannesburg.
 

Pires explains that he is interested in the banality of these objects; reorganizing them in a ridiculous and absurd manner, creating characters that confront the viewer within the gallery space.  “I really love the contexts from where all of these objects come from. 

They were carefully selected from each environment, some contexts are more obvious than others and can be found everywhere, used by different people in everyday society. I am curious about the dialogue between these objects and the viewer”.

Pires adds that this is his way of talking about identity, stereotypes and everyday life.  “I feel there is something really powerful in these objects.  The relationship that we have with them can create space for the unusual.  These objects are known by all of us and in a way they bring us closer”, signifying “a desire to be reunited with a lost centre of personality” in a graphic form depicting the “tension between the ‘laws of human society’ and the resistance of the unconscious mind to these laws” (Zivkovic, 2000:120).

“The drawings, on the other hand, have a more aesthetic approach representing actions and situations relating to the human body. I try to create them with a poetic and elegant approach by using an action that is quite violent to the paper.  Grinding steel, for example, will send flammable sparks onto the paper creating a doppelgänger of the sculpture, now reflected on the paper” explains Pires.

All of these works created by Pires become a mirror reflecting that which exists dependently with and “pursues the subject as [its] second self” making it “feel as himself and the other at the same” (Zivkovic, 2000:121).

Doppelgänger opens on Thursday the 1^st of December 2016 at Gallery MOMO Johannesburg at 18:00 and co-incides with the final First Thursday programme for 2016.  The exhibition concludes in mid-January 2017.

Pedro Pires | Doppelgänger
1 December - 30 January 2017 
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