José Guedes is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist committed to the contemporary society represented by the spirit of emerging movements connected with open knowledge and collective intelligence. He is an artist who integrates with the technological media and supports of his time and his ideas are associated with the reality of our age, so that icons of the present form part of his eclectic but everyday works. Whichever discipline Guedes chooses to communicate with the public, whether it be photography, video, installation, painting, drawing, objects or intervention, it shows a common substratum reflected in his fondness for engaging with and addressing moments or details of the domestic life of our time. We might say that he takes recognisable stereotypes of the “system” as points of reference in order to focus on them and create a personal narrative discourse, often containing criticism and denunciation that are consubstantial with the thorny public life of the country in which he lives.

 What Guedes proposes with this artistic discourse is that every object possesses a poetics within itself that it is capable of expressing because it contains a restrained emotion, a lyricism wanting to be discovered so that it can emerge. It is the freedom of the artist’s language that enables him to find this sensibility in objects and give them a theatrical quality that they initially seem to lack. Through the intervention of art, everyday things reveal vital aspects that make them part of a grand theatrical design, either by occupying a new space or by lighting.

His works, especially in his installations, express an ephemeral testimony of the instantaneous and therefore present a lively resistance to performing emblematic functions and legitimising established social forms, concentrating their efforts instead on the production of a public dialogue. Even in the very ephemerality of some of his works he substantiates the need for the establishment of a permanent intellectual space in which reasoned reflection and discussion about shared social interests are possible. The works he presents revitalise and renew the accepted social repertoire, highlighting the firm steps of the new age and abandoning or desanctifying the vestiges of a heritage rooted in the collective tradition.

The most innovative recent art, especially in the last few years, championed by accredited artists such as Guedes, has become enveloped in a total theatricality in which it realises its obsession with going beyond the domestic dimension by the use of theatrical qualities and a new poetics. Freedom, plurality, dynamism, innovativeness, interrelation and, above all, reflective and critical ability might be some of the attributes that mark the reality of new contemporary art.