Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 24, 2008.
At São Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho this fall, I saw for the first time the sexy and cerebral, disciplined and dissipated work of Odires Mlászho. He juxtaposes ordinary mortal faces and Roman portrait sculptures with geometric rigor in his collage series A Fossil Dig Full of Hooks. He cunningly cements pages of reference books together in his sculpture Enciclopédia Britânica. His most powerful works (a series called Butchers and Master Apprentices) involve elaborate collage rearrangements of male nudes that manage to look at once disemboweled and bloodless. Diaphanous yet strong, a body becomes a deconstruction of a flesh-colored Herman Miller lamp.
Though this piece is miniscule and hardly does justice to Mlászho’s work, I have included it to draw attention to an artist who has not yet been exhibited in North America.
