Gabriel Pessoto

Gabriel, it’s a pleasure to talk to you, thank you for taking the time to do this! Tell us about yourself; your name, your age, or any other characteristic you might think important.

How nice to be here – I’m excited! I’m Gabriel Pessoto, 29 years old, born in Jundiaí, in the country outside São Paulo. I grew up in Porto Alegre, where I studied, and now I’m working in São Paulo, where I have my studio.

Tell us a bit about your techniques and the materials that you like using. 

I think less in terms of one technique and I move through different materialities according to my research. In my studies, I explored different techniques, so I had contact with video, painting, drawing, and engraving, and from there I went on to refine my research a little. What makes the most sense to me today is working with electronic media and digital work. This can manifest itself as video, projection, a video installation, textile materials, and especially tapestries. This duet between electronics and textiles is what’s strongest for me right now.

Inclusive, pensando numa relação, embora sejam técnicas quase antagônicas, uma que vem de uma prática mais tradicional e outra mais atual, é uma mídia nova, eu vejo que tem um contato muito grande entre elas do ponto de vista da materialidade dessa imagem que é um código.

(Translation: When thinking about a connection, even though they are almost antagonistic techniques, with one that comes from a more traditional practice and the other being a more current, new, media, I see that there is a lot of contact between them from the point of view of the materiality of the image, which is a code.). I think these interest me most at the moment; textile and electronic media.

What was it like to navigate between these two techniques – textiles and electronics – that don’t receive as much attention at art college, which tends to prioritize more classic media, such as painting and sculpture?

I did have access to these more traditional techniques, but textiles weren’t really dealt with. We didn’t have any practical activities in this area during our degree course and even though there was some attention given to photography and video, digital wasn’t a focus of the course either. Before I studied visual arts, which I didn’t complete, I had a degree in cinema. My relationship with digital image comes from the experience of manipulating images as a video editor. This is an interesting fact that I’ve been revisiting and thinking about. It was by editing the image that I began to grow, to try to understand what’s behind this digital weave, and how different cameras generate different characteristics in the digital image. How the resolution, the format in which the video is encoded, and where it will play, are factors that influence the visuality and reception of this material. It was during cinema school that I started to pay attention to, and became interested in, the materiality of the digital image, and realized that it also has many parallels with textile fabric.

When studying cinema, did you cover time-based media or just classic cinema?

The course was more focused on a classical understanding of cinema and we went through the history of traditional and documentary cinema. It was also a course that, in a way, prepared us technically so that we could fulfil certain functions, including in other audiovisual areas. There’s a festival in Porto Alegre called Cine Esquema Novo, which fills this gap in the repertoire of both video art and experimental cinema. It’s a platform that shows expanded cinema, from movie theatres, to installations, to performances. This contact helped me to form my taste and helped me realize that I was interested in this. When I started attending the festival, it became clear that what really interested me were these paths of formalist experimentation, or more installation-based approaches to the moving image. These possibilities appealed to me more than narrative issues, which I also appreciate, but are not where I feel most comfortable moving with my authorial work. 

Where do you find inspiration?

I have always loved looking at images, and I have had a retinal fascination with looking at these images since I was a child. The TV, which was this object with moving images switched on in the living room, was fascinating. In printed media – magazines, illustrated children’s books – it incited me that someone had created those images. When I found myself thinking about the authorship of these illustrations, I was very impacted by, and curious about, the process behind it. I was born in the early 90s and grew up throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a period in which I observed a rapid digitalization process of culture. The same image was passing through different media, from VHS to DVD, Blu-ray, and high-resolution files, or streaming. The same digitization process has also affected photography and amateur image-making. I had access to an analogue camera, but this gesture of producing a photo quickly migrated to an electronic camera, and then to the mobile phone. Therefore, observing these images passing through so many media and resolutions very quickly roused a lot of interest in me. Putting it more practically, we have the digital image of the internet, this almost infinite collection of images, and, often, they are amateur images people post of their intimacies, or images with no clear authorship. They are things that are just there, and nobody knows where they come from or where they go, because they are hyper-processed. In parallel, I only got a more organized education in art history as an adult, because I didn’t have much access to it during my childhood and adolescence. As a result, encounters with aesthetic objects happened through contact with communication and entertainment media, and also with handicraft items, decorative objects in the house, and domestic items that were produced a lot by the people in my family. Although I had no formal contact with art history, or access to these “official” images during childhood, I had a very rich formation of other visualities, and a playful relationship with these images.

A minha inspiração vem desses lugares da internet, que é essa loucura de imagens amadoras, de imagens de toda espécie, e também dos objetos cotidianos, que são estéticos, mas não estão exatamente mediados pelo campo da arte. E o que tem em comum nessas duas imagens, talvez seja um pouco desse aspecto do amador tentando não ser pejorativo.

(Translation: My inspiration comes from these places on the internet, which is this madness of amateur images, of all kinds of images and everyday objects, which are aesthetic but not exactly mediated by the field of art. What these two images have in common is some of this aspect of the amateur – not in the pejorative sense.). They are not images conceived with a defined function but made from a gesture of care, taste, or decorative desire. Something also interests me about this issue of craftsmanship: the ability to codify and reproduce patterns and images. They usually have a pattern passed from generation to generation, from hand to hand, and we also lose the stability of who produced this stitch, graphic, pattern, set of stitches, etc. Another interesting point of contact and approximation between handicraft and digital images is that even handicrafts are becoming industrialized, or having their image appropriated by machine processes. In the making of bed linens, table linens, and bath linens, produced on a large scale, we can observe the permanence of some common visual patterns from when the pieces were first manufactured. Once embroidered in cross-stitch, the floral pattern can now be printed on a bedspread or sheet. It’s this transition of images through different media, more electronic or handmade, that inspires me.

You recently did an illustration project for a children’s book. What was it like to adapt your inspiration and creative process to a very specific brief: a children’s book, which is open but, at the same time, it has its restrictions and a different way of thinking?

It was a different process. I recently worked on a project called “Pedro’s Aquarium”, a story created by the writer Diego Mauro. It was a spontaneous encounter mediated by a friend who knew Diego had a story and was looking for someone to illustrate it. I said: “Well, I don’t have a story, but I want to illustrate it” (laughs). And it worked out well. I allowed myself to revisit my taste for children’s books to some extent. I tried to make a book I would have liked to see. I even chose to do it all in colored pencil, a material that is quite widespread in childhood, that we have greater access to, and with which we are familiar. So, I hope to achieve this enchantment in children who may realize, “Oh my God! Someone made this, and I can make something similar with my crayons.” I was able to use some of the skills acquired in film training. The book has a cinematic narrative in the images’ thinking, and the story’s editing.

What are the main challenges you have experienced in your career as an artist? 

This is the most difficult question (laughs). I couldn’t think of anything specific, but I was thinking about my trajectory and its difficulties. I graduated in cinema and did not complete my degree in visual arts. Still, even if I had finished it, I wouldn’t have had access to the information I did learn so quickly. Coming from a place where it was not common to be an artist, I didn’t have many references close to me. I had to dig around, trying to understand the game’s rules. It took me a long time to understand the importance of having an organized portfolio, and which were the interesting call outs I should apply to. When I was starting out, and still living in Porto Alegre, I felt distant from the exhibition spaces and opportunities. As time passed, I understood what kind of organizations I would have to move around in. I believe this was the challenge: learning while I was doing, discovering the dynamics, and how I had to operate within the art system. This was never given to me. Today, I already understand better what I need to do, what kind of documents I need to have, what contacts I can make with people, and who the agents of the system are. Nowadays, there may be some study groups, or monitoring groups, that can fill this gap in the training, but in general, we enter into a career in a very blind way and learn as we go along. 

There are many ways to create an art career. There is not only one path. You mentioned this move from Porto Alegre to São Paulo. How long ago did you move to São Paulo?

I’ve been here since 2017, so six years.

Would you say that this move was key for your career?

Yes, I came here to better understand how things work, and to try to insert myself in a more incisive way. This change was very important for me to gain access to obscure information, to be able to organize myself better, and to understand a little more about the professionalization of my career. I had access to alternative studying groups that filled in these gaps in my training, and, of course, here there is a concentration, for better or for worse. It’s a shame that here is a city that has so much of the art movement concentrated within it, while other places are often left ignored, but it’s been great to experience this bubbling up. I’m really happy to be here, doing what I love.

University used to be the place where you could meet your peers and create these support groups. Nowadays, it’s much easier to organize yourself online and meet other people outside of your everyday life.

Participating in the kind of alternative training that welcomes people at different points in their careers, has been very rich. There are people with more established careers who are there to talk about their work, but there are also people who are just starting out and are looking for the first inputs to begin working with. In these exchanges of people, in different contexts and at different moments in their career, we can learn from each other; both those with more experience and those who are arriving full of desires. This also gives us a boost when we are already addicted to our process or disillusioned with certain dynamics.

Gabriel, how does your creative process work? Starting from your inspirations to what becomes a finished work of art that goes out into the world? 

 I have the habit of collecting images. I have a small collection of printed material; mainly magazines and manuals on “how to do” handicrafts and artisanal work. Parallel to this, I am building up a vast collection of images I collect from the internet, or screenshots I took. The work happens when I mix these elements and temporal objects. Sometimes, I see an embroidery pattern and think, “Well, I think this could be very interesting if it moved, in being an electronic work”. When I see a digital image with a specific characteristic, I want to see how it could physically materialize in an unexpected media. I transform this digital image into a tapestry or, finally, a drawing. It’s very much out of curiosity that this happens. I look at an image and think, “Wow, I want to see this image in another media or see how it would fit in another context”. And, of course, there is a more conceptual discussion, which is not so much about the handmade but about the impact of these amateur images – they are not exactly from official media, nor mediated by the field of art, but which affect the construction of our desires, our repertoire, and idealizations. My interest may move to other questions. However, I have been thinking a lot about this notion of the idealized home, the romantic life for two, very much reiterated by more traditional images, which have the characteristic of the romantic, the idyllic, as something almost unattainable nowadays, or were so in the past, even. At the same time, there are digital images which reinforce other parameters of idealized behavior. We get used to seeing these images produced by other people, coming from their personal lives. I try to understand how this operates in the construction of our subjectivity, of our desires and idealizations.

Eu fico promovendo esse pequeno curto-circuito entre um repertório tradicional e um repertório que é muito corriqueiro. Os dois são bem corriqueiros e triviais, e essas imagens que não são oficiais também operam na construção dos nossos desejos.

(Translation:  I keep advancing this short-circuit between a traditional repertoire and a very commonplace repertoire. Both are commonplace and trivial, and these images that are not official also operate in constructing our desires.) I prefer to maintain ambiguity when transferring images from one media to another; for example, when I use a traditional embroidery pattern in a digital work. These conventional patterns are often loaded with a pedagogical characteristics and values that I can’t entirely agree with. However, as images they have an appeal in what we understand as being affective memory. They are beautiful, recognizable, and accessible too. Working with this ambiguity, this dislocation, and this fascination – but with a certain uneasiness that they cause – is where I feel more at ease.

Embora eu veja que, eventualmente, existe esse desejo de destruir essas imagens, eu acho que é importante olhar para elas, entender o que elas formaram, o que elas formam e como elas ainda têm um certo efeito na nossa percepção. Elas ainda oferecem justamente aquilo que elas prometem, que é uma beleza estranha.

(Translation: Although I see that, eventually, there is a desire to destroy these images, it is important to look at them to understand what they have made, what they created, and how they still affect our perception. They still offer exactly what they promise, which is a strange beauty.)

Yes, and it seems to me that, besides the images, through the titles of your works you bring some of this vocabulary. Do you want to tell us about these decisions?  

The titles come a little from this collection of images and elements I edit as I do the works, starting from this collection aspect. Publications about manual work, handicrafts, and tasks often linked to women’s work, have a specific language that is also very outdated. When we rediscover these constructed texts today, they contain a certain sense of humor, and a little absurdity. I operate almost like an image editor, and I understand the titles as a part of the work, which is a collage, in effect. I play with this language, characteristic of a certain publication type and repertoire. This displacement explicitly changes their ideology and gives the work a layer of humor, and some extra meaning.