Fernando Carpaneda: A Life of Paint, Sex and Rock 'n' Roll (2012)

Richard Lynch travels to Merrick, Long Island, New York to speak to controversial artist Fernando Carpaneda about a life of paint, sex and rock 'n' roll. Fernando was one of the first Brazilian visual artists to divulge and exhibit systematically homoerotic works in Brazil. But since the 80s, his work hasn't been limited to this one approach only. Beggars, popstars, prostitutes, drug users, punks and outcasts of all kinds are the object of his attention and look. He portrayed them in clay sculptures and denuded them in what they possessed as sacred and profane. This plunge into street culture now gives voice to a new stage, in which his concern with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define life - physical and spiritual, rational and instinctive, chaste or sexual - emerge. Formally, he has used an intransigent matrix of materials, exploring the potentially artistic use of the DNA, be it his own hair or that of his models, and blending it with wood, fabric, cement, stencil and canvases while preparing his sculptures and paintings. Carpaneda explores these paradoxes in conceptual and experimental works translated, most of them, into figurative form. Memories, sentences, and spiritual and popular beliefs of his characters from the past now take part in the work of the artist. Carpaneda's new sculptures, paintings and drawings deal many times with the distant relation we have with our inner nature, accentuating the conflict between 'natural' and 'cultural', which have control over the contemporary psyche.