Cyríaco Lopes
Criminals (Rio de Janeiro) is made of altered images of criminals taken from the Brazilian press. They are the soldiers of an undeclared civil war, victims and perpetrators, actors of an environment that learned to live with a murder rate similar to countries at war. In this work, the news media becomes a theater of violence and eroticism as these Rio de Janeiro marginal-heroes are posed like stars for the paparazzi at a police press conference.
The series is somewhat of a portrait of my hometown and favorite place on earth, so beautiful and sexy, so unjust and dangerous.
Selections from the series, Criminals (Rio de Janeiro), photographs on aluminum, 2008 – ongoing.
Cyriaco Lopes is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively on an international scale. Note worthy exhibits include – shows at The Contemporary Art Museums in Baltimore and Saint Louis, El Museo del barrio and Apexart, NYC (U.S.A), Artforum 3, Freiburg, (Germany), Art Cinema OFFOff, Gent, (Belgium), and Casa Degli Artist, Milan, (Italy). In his native Brazil his work appeared at the National Museum of Fine Arts, The Museums of Modern Art in Rio and Salvador and the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP). He is the recipient of The Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis Project Award (2003) and the World Studio Foundation Award (2001), amongst others. The artist holds two MFAs: one in Imaging and Digital Arts, UMBC, Baltimore (2002), and the other in Visual Languages, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro (1999). He also attended artist’s residencies such as Skowhegan (2002), Parque Lage (1995) and the London Project (1994). Lopes is a professor at John Jay College/CUNY in NYC.
http://www.cyriacolopes.com/