The Game Room and Other Minefields
By Douglas de Freitas

2017

​

In the year marking 30 years of his artistic production, artist Márcio Almeida presents the exhibition The Game Room and Other Minefields at the Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is undoubtedly an opportunity to dive into the artist's universe, now transformed into a major show featuring 35 works across different disciplines such as drawing, objects, sculpture, and installation, among many other media.

Márcio's earliest artistic experiments through drawing remain visible as a guiding thread throughout his career, even when the works are installations and objects that engage with the city and its social and political events. Drawing as a language plays an important role in translating a thought—the artist's way of thinking—and thus becomes a constant presence in his projects, where the idea is the main starting point and is itself the artwork.

A large part of Almeida's works operates on the principle of the Duchampian readymade. The artist reconfigures and redefines objects, giving them another value and meaning through his practice. Coincidence or not, Chess, so dear to Márcio, was also Marcel Duchamp's game of choice.

With a strong conceptual weight and a critical stance, his projects look at the present, addressing issues that surround us in daily city life. It is a generous gaze shared with us as spectators, and with other artists and agents in the process of making art. In his career, Almeida was a member of the Carga e Descarga group [1], an important artistic collective in Recife, and has also created works in partnership with artists Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago.

In The Game Room and Other Minefields, an important element seems to translate the artist's place of action. Márcio Almeida took on the role of curator, choosing the works that best represent the conceptual framework he intended for the exhibition. Always positioning himself as artist, author, and producer, and now as the curator himself, Almeida claims his autonomy within the art world. He is the one who decides which pawns play in his game room.

Douglas de Freitas

[1] The group Carga e Descarga was formed by Dantas Suassuna, Flávio Emanuel, Márcio Almeida, and Maurício Silva, and was active between 1995 and 2000.