Introduction
Based in Sao Paulo, artist Jac Leirner is one of the most emblematic figures of the Brazilian art scene in the last fifteen years. Most of the time, she creates sophisticated abstract compositions made out of our society of consumption's rejected items. She collects cigarettes packets, plane tickets, envelopes, leaflets, stickers and museum shops' plastic bags, all of which she then turns into artworks, thanks to a patient work of filing and installation. She often finds her materials during the frantic duration of her journeys; what comes out of it reflects her enduring interest in visual design and in the ways business and culture interact.
Out of this flow of information and objects, Jac Leirner discloses a refined formal language, which makes her an heir of Brazil's historic modern art. Her rigorous handling of shape and colour evidently comes out of the rationalism of Brazilian geometric abstraction of the Fifties. Jac Leirner's oeuvre is also influenced by a movement within the early 1960's Brazilian art, which tends to come back to using common materials and experiments with more fluid ideas about time, space and form.
Jac Leirner's propositions, systematically driven through by these various currents, are an attempt to reveal that which, in the middle of scattered mass information, remains extraordinary, rare, unique, personal. Jac Leirner invests the whole of Le Grand Café building for her exhibition, with a site-specific installation.