Diego Oliveira March 21, 2025 – April 25, 2025.
Faculty of Visual Arts
Federal University of Goiás.
Goiânia - GO.
Curated by Joardo Filho.
The exhibition Urgent Delivery (Entrega Urgente), a solo show by Diego Oliveira, is presented by the FAV Gallery in partnership with Barranco Ateliê and curated by Joardo Filho. It features works by an artist-photographer-delivery driver who explores photography as a narrative device. According to the curator, Diego integrates photography into his work routine and the “daily grind of deliveries to create aesthetic and conceptual works about his reality, while also reflecting the social dynamics at play around him.” The exhibition consists of works that were shown last year at the Museu de Artes Plásticas de Anapolis (Museum of Visual Arts of Anápolis) and in the exhibition “Every Delivery Is Urgent,” held at Pé Vermelho Espaço Contemporâneo in Planaltina, Federal District, and resulting from the Artistic Residency Award of the 28th Anapolino Art Salon.
The exhibition kicks off the FAV Gallery’s 2025 exhibition schedule and underscores the gallery’s commitment to establishing partnerships with art spaces in the Midwest region, as was the case in 2023 with “Sementes Sertanejas,” an exhibition in partnership with “Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Arte,” and in 2024, with the exhibition “Telhado de Sonho” in partnership with “A Pilastra Galeria-Escola.
Diego Oliveira has participated in exhibitions at various venues, including the 27th Salão Anapolino de Arte (2024) at the Cultural Center of the Federal University of Goiás and the Antonio Sibasolly Gallery, the Salão Nacional de Arte de Jataí at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Jataí (2023), the exhibition “Abrir Horizontes” at the Octo Marques Cultural Center (2023), as well as the “Entremeios” exhibition at the Museu de Artes Plásticas de Anápolis (Anápolis Museum of Visual Arts), in 2020. He also received the Salão Anapolino Award in 2020 and 2023.
Zona de conforto (2020)
Photos: Diego Oliveira
Text by Joardo Filho, Curator of the exhibition.
At 9:48 a.m. on an ordinary day, Diego Oliveira uses his cell phone to capture the moment just as he is about to enter the building where he is going to make a delivery. Standing before a glass door, the image is a self-portrait of Diego on the threshold between the chaos of the external environment and the hostility of the interior. His features are hidden behind his uniform, rendering him anonymous in his own self-portrait, yet reinforcing the visual markers of a motorcycle courier. The photographs in the series Reflexão (2020–2021), which recur during deliveries on other days at 5:27 p.m. and 2:10 p.m., can be seen as the essence of this artist’s work; as he reflects on labor, he makes a point of presenting himself as an artist-delivery person.
Previously, in Percepção (2019–2021), Diego Oliveira had already demonstrated the power of an artistic practice that integrates photography into his daily work routine, during which he delivers dental supplies to various clinics, typically located in buildings with narrow, dimly lit entrances. He positions himself inside these spaces and photographs the life unfolding on the street. Perception is a work imbued with all the knowledge and skill of the artist-photographer. With a refined play of light and dark, he captures his everyday scenes as if he had aligned his mind, eye, and heart. But Diego, a dedicated scholar of the history of photography, goes beyond the French influence of the previously mentioned Henri Cartier-Bresson and draws on the German objectivity of Bernd & Hilla Becher to transform this photographic style into a typology of the entrances to commercial buildings in downtown Anápolis, viewed from the inside.
Percepção could be mistaken for an aesthetic exercise by someone passionate about photography. But it is important to emphasize that photography in this artist-worker’s practice serves as a narrative device. In other words, he incorporates photography into the daily routine of deliveries to create aesthetic and conceptual works about his reality, while also reflecting the social dynamics at play around him. In the polyptych presented in the exhibition, there are several passersby about whom we know practically nothing. In the triptych from the same series, however, workers are captured in the midst of their trades. But in Entrega 09:48, Entrega 17:27, and Entrega 14:10, from the Reflexão series, his research dynamic takes a new step. Diego begins to let go of aesthetic refinement to create a photograph he classifies as “dirty,” taken with the same urgency as his deliveries. In these works, he explicitly positions himself as a character, as an observer and participant in this reality he seeks to understand.
The artist-photographer-delivery person is someone who lives and performs their own reality. In Zona de conforto (2020), Diego Oliveira is shown in his home environment. No longer on the streets on his motorcycle and wearing a helmet, he stands in a corner of his house. He appears as someone seemingly fragile and insignificant, like other inanimate objects in the backyard. The self-portrait/performance photograph reveals a restless body, as comfortable as reality allows him to be.
With a body of work that already explored his place in the world in a complex way, Diego Oliveira has begun to incorporate into his most recent works an imagery drawn from the images circulating in the public sphere. The artist-sertanejo identifies his Goiás roots as something that distances him from the hegemonic motorcycle culture of the metropolises, where the symbolism of the motoboy was forged. Having grown up in São Francisco de Goiás and now living in Anápolis, Diego seeks new ways to understand himself in the series Sertanejo Nato (2024). He begins by investigating the motorcycle-carriage hybrid, creating a sequence with internet videos in the work Colocar a moto na frente das carroças / Put the motorcycle in front of the wagons (2024). Like the other binomials already mentioned throughout the text, the combination of motorcycle and carriege symbolizes Diego Oliveira’s artistic identity, which is constantly under construction.
Finally, we have a reinterpretation of the research known as “The Horse in Motion,” developed starting in the 1870s by the Englishman Eadweard Muybridge. The sequence of 16 photographs capturing a horse’s movements is one of the greatest classics of photography and also a precursor to cinema. In 2022, American director Jordan Peele speculates in his film “Nope” about the identity of the Black jockey, erased by Muybridge, who appears in these photos. Diego Oliveira assimilates all of this and sees in this anonymous man on a horse a precursor to the anonymous men on motorcycles. “A Horse and a Delivery Man” (2024) possesses the restraint of his photographic research, positioning it on the border with cinema, yet plays with Pop Art by superimposing the monochrome imagery with the vibrant red Ifood backpack. In this growing manipulation of ideas, symbols, and media filtered through his unique lens, Diego’s own work seems to become increasingly urgent.
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