The Listings; Os Gêmeos: Cavaleiro Marginal
By Ken Johnson
Os Gemeos, Portugese for the twins, is the name of a Brazilian team of art-making brothers, Octavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who were born in 1974. They are prodigiously resourceful painters, sculptors, muralists, graffiti artists, graphic designers and photographers who have exhibited internationally, and they have created a sweet, faux-innocent magic theater of an installation for their first New York exhibition. It features a gargantuan, three-dimensional, barefoot puppet (above) in a stuffed blue and red suit who lies on his side with his knees up so as to fit into the gallery. This character's head is enclosed within a big box with lavishly decorated doors opened to reveal his impassive cartoon face. Walk around behind the box and you find inside an entirely mirrored room occupied by a child-size figure of a girl in a small wooden boat. Additionally, the artists have covered the gallery walls with a yellow sky punctuated by puffy white clouds. A big round fish decorated with sequins and trailing painted peacock feathers hovers on one wall above aqua blue ocean waves that encircle the gallery, and a girl in a tall conical dress anchored to another fish is painted on the opposite wall. A near life-size houseboat inhabited by all sorts of quirky characters and animals fills the long wall. What it all means is hard to say, but the experience is transporting.