henrique oliveira: tapumes

In Portugese, the word ‘tapumes’ means fence or enclosure. As an art student in Brasil, the view outside of Henrique Oliveira’s room was a cheap plywood fence that surrounded a construction site across the street.  Over a two year period he watched the wood decay, split and peel apart and thought about using it as an alternative canvas for his paintings.

Tapumes 2009, wood, 13.5 ft. x 38.5 ft. x 5.74 ft. Rice Gallery

Oliveira, who has a BFA in painting and a Masters in Visual Poetics (I love the sound of that), collected piles of the wood from the streets of São Paolo, initially using it as a canvas until one day he noticed that the thin, broken pieces reminded him of brush strokes. This discovery was a pivotal point and he immediately began using the colored wood as the ‘paint’ on a series of sculptures that took his two dimensional paintings into what he calls ‘tridimensionals’.

Tapumes, 2008,  wood and pvc, 10.6 ft x 20.6 ft. x 3 ft.

The work is astounding and utterly inviting – full of movement with curves that mimic crashing waves and bulging organic shapes – any harsh lines are softened by a muted color palette.

Tapumes, detail

Trunk, wood and pvc, 7.5 ft. x 7.9 ft. x 15.8 ft.

He treats the wood with a color wash that allows the grain and texture to show through, then adds layers of the material to a basic structure that has been pieced together with screws.

Henrique Oliveira at work

In the video below Oliviera speaks about his process to a group of students at the recent Rice Gallery solo exhibit of his work.

Watch this time-lapse video of the installation coming together.  Oliveira and four assistants worked 15 days, 12 hours each day to create this massive installation.

From Rice Gallery’s description of the exhibit:

“’Oliveira’s installations, which he refers to as “tridimensionals,” have evolved into massive, spatial constructions that combine painting, architecture, and sculpture. In some installations he uses walls as supports, attaching and shaping lengths of PVC tubing to create enormous, protruding forms over which he layers thin sheets of wood. In others, he arranges thousands of pieces of painted wood into gestural abstract “paintings” that spill off the wall into the viewer’s space.”