Today we have chosen to present the work of an artist who extends beyond our planet. Marcio Vilela has decided to lean over with a child’s wonder and a limitless curiosity about the phenomenon of satellites.
It started seven years ago when he stared at the sky one night and realized that the star he was staring at was not one but a satellite that could appear as fast as it appeared. Science and astronomy have always been part of Marcio Vilela‘s childhood.
From the first launch of a space satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957 to the world phenomenon and the expansion of thousands of satellites in the sky, the artist wanted to explore all the mechanisms and play with them. It’s in an artistic residence in the Azores that things became serious, through photography.
Difficult to distinguish a plane from a star or from a satellite to the naked eye sometimes. The satellite has a medium speed between the plane and the shooting star. Marcio Vilela has chosen to make this complex world more accessible through drawing, photography or video. Tracing the course of some satellites. Captivating also their cosmic language filled with codings. To achieve this result Marcio Vilela has been immersed for months, nights in the mountains of the Pyrenees, in Spain but also in Portugal. Everything had to be perfectly calculated to know the time of passage of a satellite and also to be able to identify it, while trying to understand its message and its mission.
The dimension becomes poetic, the lasers drawn by Marcio Vilela on the paths become moving drawings. These installations that plunge you into a deep darkness should go around Europe in the years to come. If satellites were created to allow communication, they should, for Marcio Vilela, also be able to bring people together on Earth, making them share an unforgettable moment in the midst of an universe of infinite possibilities. Always surrounded by scientists, Marcio Vilela should launch his own satellite, once all licenses have been validated. A satellite whose message will be in Morse. The artist has tatooed this message on his body. He is for the moment the only one to know the meaning.
From today until the September 15th you can discover Marcio Vilela‘s artworks at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair. The artist is represented at the booth 206 by the FOCO Gallery from Lisbon alongside other artists like Hugo Cantegrel, Mia Dudek and Pauline Guerrier.
T/O/S.
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