Lido Rico | Brain Trails – Ausstellung in Berlin

Lidó Rico sculptures focus on the human subject, with a particular attention to human brain and their scientific and philosophic coexistence. The brain, as the organ of the mind, has implications for broader philosophical problems, such as the nature of free will, moral responsibility, self-deception, personal identity, and perception. More and more today is getting clear how the humanist culture and the scientific one, need one another and are looking one into the other, abandoning the past behavior of living back to back inattentive one to the other.
In the society of information the transversality between disciplines, the implementation of new models and methodological strategies, the open intellectual debate, are the central axes around which rotate the relations between science and culture, scientist and artist.
Lidó Rico in his brain sculptures approaches the syndromes of different addictions, chemical and behavioral, that grip humanity in the contemporary society. Above this, the sense of human freedom, the cultural plot of our emotions, the psycho-social tiredness that seems to invade the contemporary individual also arise in front of the viewer’s eyes when confronted with Lido’s work.

Also the expressive gesture of his self-portraits works, although being a faithful representation of the emotional state of a single person, is deprived of his individuality thanks to the use of masks or stereotyped extreme gestures, and becomes universal.
Maintain a theatrical distance from authenticity, Lido’s gesture appears to be strictly related to performance. But is truly this sort of tension between two apparently contradictory elements – reality and fiction- becomes a fundamental topic in the work of the Spanish artist, a friction where every gesture is and, at the same time, is not what it represents.

Finding the balance between these contradictions, Lidó Rico’s work addresses the universal while focusing on the individual, in the attempt of freeing a grimace that is never fully subjective but belongs to that “other” in which everybody can easily recognize him or herself.

Since the beginning of his career, the Spanish artist has been developing one of the most regular, constant and personal body of works inside the Spanish art scene. A body of works in which the eminent aesthetic of the materials used in his sculptures combines itself with an indisputable performative and gestural component. Result of a violent process of gestation where the artist, in a sort of ritual act, submerges his body in plaster in order to create an empty mould that will be subsequently filled with polyester resin, Rico creates fragmented bodies and dislocated faces that literally emerge from the walls as if they wished to find relief from their own tyranny.