This work, although completed only in 2016, was started in 2012 during the Artist in Residence program "Maus Hábitos", in the city of Porto, Portugal, in which the artist sought to study the traditional embroidery of the north of that country, and incorporate aspects of this practice in his artistic production. The work began with an industrial piece, probably made in China, India or Pakistan, which reproduces in a caricatural way a typical, almost folkloric, Portuguese female costume, sold in mass souvenir shops. Over the industrial embroidery that imitates a type of traditional Portuguese handmade embroidery, the artist hand embroidered a drawing of an Israeli AR-15 rifle, widely used by drug dealers in Rio de Janeiro.
Fábio Carvalho's current art work attempts to propose a reflection on gender stereotypes and expectations, by overlapping clichés of the "ideal" masculinity , like the military, muscular athlete, the cowboy, the handyman, with elements and labors traditionally assigned to the female world, like floral decorative patterns, porcelain tableware, flowers and butterflies, embroidery and lacework. With his production, the artist seeks to question the common sense that strength and fragility, virility and poetry, masculinity and vulnerability cannot coexist, and remember that what seems eternal and definitive, are actually cultural agreements in time and space. |
