Casa Triângulo, Launching Emerging Artists Since 1988
Few can say they have seen it all. Ricardo Trevisan, director of one of downtown São Paulo’s oldest and treasured contemporary galleries—now celebrating its 25th year—might be one of those exceptions.
As an early contributor to Interview magazine in the 1980s, interviewing and photographing artists, curators, critics, and gallerists, Trevisan had a front-row seat from which he watched the rapid social and cultural changes taking place in Brazil’s largest city—particularly in the country’s art world. “There was no escape, I fell in love and got involved—I got tied into this whole web. Increasingly immersed in the medium, I realized the limited presence of young and emerging artists in the market and intuitively, I took a risk: I decided to transform the house where I lived into a gallery,” he writes in Casa Triângulo 2013/1988, a book about the gallery that launches this April. So began the storied history of Casa Triângulo, Trevisan’s passion project and home-turned-gallery on the second floor of a 1920s building with a triangular floor plan.
An experimental space dedicated to providing a platform for emerging Brazilian and Portuguese artists, Casa Triângulo occupied an uncertain position at the forefront of the city’s cutting-edge art scene. Trevisan explains, “At that time there was no art market as we understand it today. The boom of the 1980’s was in decline, and gallerists preferred to invest in established names, rather than to work with new talent. And there were few collectors or investors in art.” Almost three decades later, Trevisan’s gamble has paid off. With Brazil now touted as an increasingly important player in the international art market thanks, in part, to the country’s economic boom of the last few years, and works by Brazilian artists being snapped up at the auction houses in New York, Casa Triângulo, a renowned and respected institution, has a strong foothold from which to launch the careers of exciting new artists.
With Casa Triângulo’s booth opening at leading São Paulo fair, SP-Arte, next week (and Artsy poised to provide access wherever you are in the world), and a coinciding solo show of Joana Vasconcelos’s work at the gallery’s headquarters, there will be no shortage of opportunities to engage with Trevisan’s roster of artists over the coming weeks. Highlights from the booth include new works by Sandra Cinto, whose immersive installations of the natural world and smaller-scale works incorporating the forms of musical instruments engaged in moments of silence, have captivated audiences; and works by Albano Afonso from his series, “Crystallization of Landscape,” whose rich, painterly photographs of landscapes address the way the natural world is captured and conveyed in contemporary imagery. And over at Casa Triângulo itself, one of the gallery’s now-established artists Joana Vasconcelos presents colorful, tactile installations, sculptures, and wall pieces composed of her signature textiles and everyday objects and ornaments, repurposed. And if you don’t make it Brazil this year, catch the gallery’s presentations at Frieze New York and Art Basel Hong Kong later this spring.
