Aline Setton
Visual Reverb
Written by: Sophie Sobol
An aging brick house drifts through time but not space, graffiti tattooing its garage door, weeds growing up its steps, and faces a titanium-grade home of futuristic charm across the street. How do these two architectural timelines exist on the same street, in the same space, in the same image? Artist Aline Setton lives for such urban juxtapositions, exploring the meaning of their rebounding vibrations and visual reverberations in her art. Brazilian artist Aline Setton’s new solo exhibition “Visual Reverb” investigates the intersections between intersections themselves. She is interested in the meeting points that exist between image and space, between the past and the present, between the here and there, and the globalized everywhere. This exhibition, which includes the permanent mural on the outside wall of the Arterial exhibition space, features a collection of polished painted collages and geometric sculptures that speak to Setton’s preoccupation with crossroads of images, ideas, and landscapes that are present in an urbanized city-scape.
Having grown up in Sao Paolo, Brazil before moving to Toronto in 2017, the distinction between rural and urban has become a major theme in her work. Setton constructs dynamic, emotional art that creates meaning through juxtaposition, through its points of tension and release, exploring how a space in Toronto can trigger memories of a space in Sao Paolo, and beyond, in a globalized world. Setton’s art process is a rigorous, structured study intersection. First, she collects an archive of imagery tied to a theme, some personal some not, and looks to find contrasts and connections. She then takes these analog images and edits them digitally, adjusting colours and contexts and thus merging the boundaries of the real and the surreal. Ultimately, Setton is looking for a combination of images that will create the most powerful emotional response in her art.
Finally, once she feels her process of collage reaches a resolution, she turns to paint, challenging herself to capture this creation with brush and paint.
“And it's also part of that process of deconstructing something to try to understand it, right. So when I'm cutting up the images, that's a way of making them feel mine and trying to understand but then I really understand the image when I'm having to recreate them, because then I know what it takes to add every single color that's involved in that image, or texture…”
It is within these points of intersection, these moments of of boundary-passing and context-shifting where Setton finds her inspiration. As the exhibition title suggests, Aline Setton’s art is a process of Visual Reverb.
