Xippas is pleased to present Obra Consciente by Dani Umpi in Punta del Este.

The exhibition focuses on a new series of big format collages Cavernas, a composition work of colours the artist has been developing recently. Since the beginning of his career, Dani Umpi has positioned himself in the space of the buffoon, the freak, the jester. His work covers different levels and planes that mix, as does person and character, artist and creation. His works reveal a particular dynamic between esoteric symbology and images referring to current popular culture and mass consumption, which when contextualized, produce a contemporary pop language of the 21st century. Umpi blends the sacred with the profane, intuition with speculation, the banal with the transcendent, superficiality with the abyss. The Jester, an opposing and complementary figure to the Master, creates symbolic works, proposes transcendent reflections. The realization of the works is compulsive, obsessive, accumulative, almost cathartic, leaving nothing to chance. The chaos or the apparent informality of his proposal,
is a field dominated by simple archetypes, numbers, geometric shapes and colors. The works are cosmogonies formed by political discourses and quantum quotations, systems where the symbol can do more than the aesthetics, than the artist.

Regarding his most recent series of works entitled Caverna, the artist states: They are the consequence of experimenting for several years with the conceptual work “Parangolé” by Hélio Oiticia, making my own pieces and acting with them in various performances, I arrived at a collage technique, a composition, color management and textures that I was interested in developing. At first I opted for the large scale, proposing a reading of the piece from a more sculptural place. The parangolé no longer moves, it is something else, although its origin continues to manifest itself even as a device that asks for distance, to be contemplated and traversed. A new state. The materials are simple: magazines and adhesive tape. I cut out texts on colors that I classify and order. The scale of this series is smaller … or larger. As they have no movement I see them at times as collages, and at others as tapestries. A wall, a barrier, a cave. The title of the series redirects the reading to the platonic symbolism of the cave, that underground room where we are imprisoned until someone takes us out to discover what exists behind the shadows that could be those texts, echoes of who knows what, fighting with colors and folds. The problem of now and always. That world of images that traps our sensitive experience and from which, if we have managed to get out, we have the obligation to get our companions out again.

Dani Umpi, 2021.