Vitché & Jana
* born in 1969 and 1978 respectively in São Paulo, Brazil
* sculpture, wall painting, drawing, stage sets, and many other mediums
Vitché’s education already began – autodidactically and intuitively – in his earliest years of childhood. Using found objects he started self-constructing toys and figures. This approach has remained relevant for Vitché over the years: he is still inspired by materials, objects, and influences from his urban environment, still collects things that are carelessly thrown away and infuses these with new life in his artworks. This process takes place either at the site of genesis – the street – or in a new setting: interior space. With his sculptures, paintings, marionettes, or even stage sets, Vitché succeeds in bridging the gap between the source of material, the urban environment, and a new medium, a new subject. The naturalness and organicism of the selected material – be it wood, wool, canvas, iron, or mud – play a crucial role in Vitché’s work, through which an attempt at redeeming the lost connection between human and nature is made.In recent years Vitché has been intensively collaborating with his wife, Jana. Their joint artistic career started off in 1998 with classical graffiti and quickly developed, just as in the case of Vitché, to an intermixture of illustrations, stage design, lithographies, and figured works. Strongly characteristic for both artists – and formative for their styles – is without doubt the narrative lyrical juncture of their works. Through a combination of graffiti and sculpture, the two Brazilians’ images as well as their figured characters almost seem scenographic and illustratory. Influenced by Polynesian, Aztecan, and Brazilian elements, by the circus, but also by a playful symbolism comingled with ancient iconographies, Vitché and Jana together unfold a rich and complex dialogue between human and material. It follows that the beings they have brought to life – primarily in the colors red, black, and white – spark immediate associations in the viewers’ minds: the artists foster an atmosphere that invites one into an obscure yet fascinating world, reminiscent of a circus or annual fair. The associative power of the works is unmistakable even if we will never be able to discern the real story behind the figures. For the characters created by the two artists appear masked, mirroring – according to Vitché and Jana – our own superficiality and insecurity. It is this insecurity that the married artists would like counteract by means of immediate visual impulses aimed at spawning within viewers a consciousness for one’s own social identity, for collectively belonging to a community.
