A QUE DEVE A HONRA DA ILUSTRE VISITA ESTE SIMPLES MARQUÊS?

In front of his seven thousand books on the Brazilian State of Paraná, then in his living room where his “old friends” the portraits are watching him, an old man shows dedications and signatures, the only living signs that remain of the prestigious guests who formerly conversed at his home. “Paintings challenge our memories”, he confides before the trap of the autobiography opens up from behind this somewhat formal presentation of a cultural aggregate. Rafael Urban’s Dinosaur Eggs in the Living Room (2011) already hinted at the rift between memory materialised in precise and precious objects and the cruel absence of the person who had collected them. A “simple marquis” who welcomes all his visitors with the title sentence, Max Conradt Jr. is a figure of the quintessential collector: his eyes, sparkling with memories, have kept the youthful impulse of an epoch that surfaces as soon as he evokes it, but his obsessive accumulation of paintings and books is busy trying to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of this world. The frontal symmetrical framing of Urban and Keller captures the junction between overflow and emptiness, vertiginously pulling the carpet from under the memory’s feet. (Charlotte Garson)