Employee Of The Month Ricardo Passaporte

Ricardo Passaporte is a Portuguese artist living in Lisbon.

Passaporte loves to paint under pressure. While his site-specific works are a result of fast-paced production, he strives to search for perfection in his work on canvas.

The artist’s body of work is deeply engaged with the history of Pop, underscoring the evolving relationship between art and commerce as well as articulating the parallels between graffiti’s custom of tagging and the same repetitive, identity-driven practise of the corporate logo. By appropriating these logos as his artistic tag, Passaporte disrupts the relationship between brand and consumer.

Of particular interest to the artist is the unpicking of the visual identity of global supermarket giants LIDL and Tesco. By experimenting with enlarging or scrambling details of the chains’ logos until they reach various levels of abstraction. The works make visible the uncanny ability of global corporations to claim ownership of even the simplest visual markers: notably the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue.

In his first solo exhibition with Ruttkowski;68 entitled: Employee Of The Month, Ricardo Passaporte shows a variety of new works on canvas as well as a site-specific installation featuring the iconic LIDL bags.

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