King of the Bottletops

May 26, 2011

by the gentle author

Emboldened by the success of the Market Portraits exhibition in the Spring, it is now my great pleasure to invite you to the second exhibition from Spitalfields Life. Please come and celebrate the opening of the debut solo show by Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops from 6pm next Thursday 2nd June.

The exhibition runs from 2nd – 3oth June at three venues in Spitalfields, agnes b. in the Spitalfields Market, The Golden Heart in Commercial St, and Rough Trade East in the Truman Brewery. Drinks will be served at agnes b, and in the Golden Heart, hosted by Sandra Esqulant.

Starting at the Golden Heart, Robson Cezar has been collecting bottletops from pubs in Spitalfields in recent years and making breathtakingly elaborate pictures of shimmering beauty. Combining the sensibility of a fine artist and the painstaking technique of a folk artist, this is an art which transforms these ill-considered objects into works of delicacy and finesse, contrived with sly humour, and playing upon their subtle abstract qualities of colour and contrast.

Robson Cezar came to Spitalfields in the footsteps of fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, who staged an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, introducing the new cultural movement of Tropicalia to Europe. And now Robson is creating his own Tropicalia here in the twenty-first century, reinventing this poverty aesthetic with a pop exuberance that reflects the cosmopolitanism of his own life experience – which began in a favela in Brazil and took him on a journey from South to North America and eventually to Europe, where he found his home in the East End of London.