A week away from leaving London and a day for setting up the Primary Codes exhibition at the Oi Futuro gallery Rua 2 December in the Flamengo district. On arrival by metro, chaperoned by Caroline and now armed with a top-uppable metro card, we walk through busy streets of market stalls and flamboyant walls of graffiti art and feel in another world from the Rio of Ipanema.
Turning the corner into a quiet road, a giant Harold Cohen work springs out from above the roof lines of the adjacent shops. This is 'Wakl in Rio' 2015. Each artist in the exhibition will have a work displayed for several weeks on the gallery facade starting with the Cohen, followed by an Ernest Edmonds a 'Cities Tango', and then works by Paul Brown and Frieder Nake.
The Oi Futuro has an old facade, representing its original use, that of a telecommunications company 'Estacao Telephonica' behind which is a totally modern construction of eight floors of glass, steel and wood. The exhibition in preparation will take over the first five floors including foyer works. The building also retains its link with telecommunications with a museum on the sixth floor.
Today there are blank screens, empty black walls, unwrapped paintings and scattered pieces of kit in every space. The artists are here to test and adjust the material supported by the formidable team Fabrizio/Caroline and a bevy of production managers and technical assistants. These are artists of the computer age brought together because they were amongst the very first to recognise the potential of computers in art. But this is not just a retrospective of that early work of the 1960s. Each artist continues to make new works and this means that the latest digital systems are being used. Inevitably this implies fine tuning and sometimes on the spot creation..
Tomorrow there should be more art to see...for now the blank walls are intriguing...
Time passes slowly but tomorrow is already here with more works on walls...!! Watch this space ...
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