Don't step on the grass, or Arcadia, 2010
Site-specific installation, land, plans, drawings.
About Change, in Latin America and the Caribbean by Váleria González, 2011
"Daniel Caballero belongs to a new generation of Brazilian artists who, alone or collectively, seek, with their work, to open alternative spaces outside museums and art galleries, not as a form of criticism of the current art system – as the avant-garde generally did – but actually seeking or creating non-institutional spaces where other forms of engagement with viewers may be possible.
This is the case with Arcadia, an intervention that was part of a collective appropriation of an old house. Daniel Caballero chose the bathroom and, without trying to conceive of it as its functional structure, transformed it into a magical space. He covered every surface of the bathroom with planted grass, texts and his typical mural painting made up of lines that look like strange water pipes or snakes, climbing freely on the walls, as if they were completely indifferent to the rational logic of architecture.
For Caballero, the limits of architectural space represent the social order, which often plays a repressive role in the creative forces of the individual. What he does is not to decorate these limits, or even to deny them, but to engage them with the space they define in a new kind of dialogue."
Text from the catalogue of the exhibition "About Change" In Latin America and the Caribbean, held in 2011 in Washington DC by the World Bank.
The exhibition presents a selection of new Latin American art.
"Design and architecture interact, but inversely, the free improvisation of the design results in the thick and continuous line that runs through the sinuous blue space of the bathroom without violating it, but rather courting it. Perhaps the intrinsic value of the free form is nothing more than a metaphysical illusion and the design can admire the solidity of things and their worldly purposes. It is no coincidence that we are in the bathroom, a place of physical needs, nudity and also cleanliness, vanity, purification.”
By Jose Bento Ferreira
