Postmodernity has questioned, among others, the supremacy of Western aesthetics. This is to say that today artists and intellectuals across the globe have produced multiple discourses questioning hegemonic ideas about art and art production. As a result, some concepts - historically anchored in classical Greek thought - have lost their absolutist power. Using new mediums such as photography, cinema, and/or computers, cutting edge artists have challenged the originality and the durability of what they create.

The trajectory of Darlan Rosa in the last decade aligns with this argument of transgression. His artistic production has long distanced, for example, from the ontological debate over whether art mimics the real world (mimesis) or it produces (imperfect) copies of an ideal reality (utopia). Instead, Darlan Rosa creates tri-dimensional objects that dialogue at the same time with the tangible world in which he lives, and the one simulated inside his computer. Without being limited by either of them.

The pieces presented in this exhibition were first conceived inside a scenario without gravity, invisibly codified as sequences of 0s and 1s. To begin with, Rosa utilizes 3D animation software to draft his imagined reality inside the world of computers, or virtual reality. Inside this zero gravity realm, Rosa articulates positive matrixes that may be (re)constructed in the tangible world, although they never cease to exist as artifices or simulacra. Darlan Rosa certainly benefits from the ability with which computer screens convey similitude. Yet, at this stage the production of images does not seem to be a priority concern. The virtual sketches Rosa draws with his digital pen follow the shift in architecture to utilize software equipped with standard principles of construction as a drafting tool. Inside that digital environment, more importantly, the artist generates a series of mathematical instructions that, once read by another machine, will manufacture the material objects with which he makes art.    

In the next phase of his creative process, Rosa fragments his computer-generated drafts into bi-dimensional surfaces, or parts, sketched in the real world’ with a laser bin. For each artwork, Darlan Rosa utilizes laser technology to cutout a set of foam board, aluminum, or stainless steel modular panels that he assembles by hand. Facing the concrete world of living beings, the artist lifts these mechanically sketched drawings, folds and unfolds them, wrapping empty space into hollow spheres. As the viewers eye travels across the continuous surface of his pieces, the juxtaposition between positive and negative space, matter and void, triggers a kinesthetic sequence of new forms. In each art object, the organically shaped parts dialogue and overlap with the geometrically imagined whole with such agility, they pull spherical void into solid gravity.