Between April 13 and May 18, 2021, Refresco hosts the solo exhibition “Longe do Fato” by the Rio de Janeiro artist Daniel Frickmann. The show features 10 acrylic paintings that represent a long-term investigation by the artist into the image and fragmentation, primarily focusing on depicting automobile accidents. Frickmann develops a process that can be characterized as a second-order abstraction. The images are figurative, but the abstract nature of the painting stems from the twisted and charred forms of the metal from the cars.

The series raises questions not only about the nature of the pictorial image but also about a Brazilian reality: violence on the roads. From the encounter between the study of form and the denunciation of the content of the image, Frickmann gives a radically new motive to a genre as simple as Brazilian landscape painting. The bucolic nature of the twisted and static automobile, much like a sculpture after an accident, generates an inherent tension linked to the violence represented.

The research for the exhibition dates back to the middle of 2014, when Frickmann would walk around with small sketchbooks. He became interested in scenes he found at junkyards in Rio de Janeiro, until he realized that an automobile accident episode best captured the aesthetic conditions he sought. From then on, he began researching Brazilian news websites that reported traffic accidents, extracting the first models for the acrylic paintings. The first works were named after the cities where the accidents took place. “Longe do Fato” constitutes an effort of distancing: the works convey a sense of indifference to life while denouncing the lethality of Brazilian roads, trivialized in the newspapers, through an aesthetic appreciation of a grave event that, for the viewer, feels distant.