Dr. Freud's Vacation

"Both Duchamp and Freud made the same fundamental gesture. This radical gesture was to “point to elsewhere.” Freud pointed to what he called “the other scene”, that is, the realm of the unconscious. Duchamp pointed to the also unsuspected field of the latent artisticity of ordinary, industrialized objects which are abundant in our daily life. Whenever we “point to elsewhere,” we perform a displacement operation, and this is what causes a polar bear to appear in the Sahara, for instance, within a dream’s logic. In this series, however, such displacement is also at the service, in the third stage of the triptychs, of an “encounter” and of strangeness: the encounter with a ladder that rises out of nowhere on a beach and leads to the sky; the encounter with a polar bear in the Sahara or with wild beasts that seem to wait patiently for a lecture. The idea of “Freud preaching in the desert” is present, of course, and there is no way to escape from it; after all, Freud’s century has passed, and people continue to be guided by the logic of accumulating little piles of money and letting the destruction drive run loose in wars that never end and that we never understand." - Excerpt from the interview published in the catalogue for exhibition ABRE ALAS 5, held at the gallery A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in 2009.