"Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto, Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, 1970) lives and works in the city where he was born, in the Bahian Recôncavo region. His permanence in his place of origin is not circumstantial, but an aesthetic and political choice. At a time when nomadism has become almost a requirement of contemporary art, Marepe proposes an inverse gesture: sedentarism as a form of resistance and creation. His work arises from a careful listening to everyday life, to his immediate surroundings, to the forms of life that persist in the interstices of modernization.
The son of an art teacher and a construction worker, Marepe grew up surrounded by objects, street markets, and popular festivals. These elements recur in his work not as simple autobiographical references, but as symbolic operators: fragments of an agnostic memory that transforms into language. The Santo Antônio de Jesus market, marked by the blending of local knowledge and global goods—especially after the 1990s—is a central theme of his poetry.
In his practice, banal objects—chairs, ladders, carts, basins—are reinterpreted, not as Duchampian ready-mades, but as "necessaires": what one needs to live. His art shifts the gaze, calls on the viewer to reconsider the value of the ordinary, and reinscribes the depths of Brazil into the global circuit, without folklore or concessions. With sensitivity and rigor, Marepe makes rootedness a starting point for a singular aesthetic and political thought, which transforms permanence into creative power. "
- Ricardo Sardenberg
Av. Padre Cacique, 2000, Porto Alegre RS
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On view August 23, 2025 – March 15, 2025
