The phantasmagorical works created by the Brazilian-born installation artist Eli Sudbrack, who goes by the acronym AVAF (for Assume Vivid Astro Focus), are dense with connections: sexual, geographic, macroeconomic, social and political.
That his widely exhibited work — created in partnership with the Paris artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson — is giddily colorful, slick and allusive, goes a long way toward explaining its attraction to museum curators and collectors, as well as his creative collaborators like Lady Gaga and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons.
That it is also unabashedly political (Mr. Sudbrack favors ideological terms like “contamination” and “insemination,” and his artistic avatar is a Cyclopean transsexual) offers insight into why the AVAF collaborators are less broadly known thantheir contemporaries here and abroad.
Days before the spring art season kicked into high gear, the 46-year-old Mr. Sudbrack, a native of São Paulo, Brazil, with a wiry mane of graying hair and a grin as broad as a cowcatcher, spoke about his latest subversions, which debut at the Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo on Thursday.
Q. Your work, which seems so exuberant and cartoonlike, draws on sources as varied as the transsexual community, the AIDS activist group Gran Fury, the performance artist Vaginal Davis, Claymation and the Original Hulk. What’s the through-line?
A. Our work has always been involved in different political issues, not only in its subject matter but often in ways related to the spaces where we show. Museums have always been concerned about safety, fire hazards and the presentation of nonsexual images. Galleries are concerned about having objects to sell.
And yet you make site specific installations that invoke the down and dirty days of the ’70s New York nightclubs or else fill a gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles with a colossal naked mannequin of a transsexual “giving birth to gay right.”
Well, we question everything.
The coming show recasts your acronym, AVAF, and it is titled Adderall Valium Ativan Focalin. Why?
We always play with the AVAF initials, for one thing. You know, I’ve been living between São Paulo and Brooklyn and in each place I feel increasingly oppressed by the city, which is a general contemporary problem. People are ultra-anxious about work or ultra-anxious about trying to relax and have a good sleep.
And somehow you relate this to the income inequality and the global real estate boom?
Specifically, metaphorically, I relate the condition to the development process of cantilevering buildings, of selling air rights to older structures so developers can build out over them. It’s a visual metaphor for psychic and physical oppression. Think of the giant new billionaires’ condos looming over Central Park. They’re literally on top of you. They’re threatening to turn it into Central Dark.
And this induces stress?
Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian star, died of a heart attack, but it’s sometimes said it was really a drug mixture. Her body gave out because she was taking so many medicines to sleep and then other medicines to wake up. That cities are getting more expensive, more gentrified, more stressful is a global issue. I see it happening in London, São Paulo, Paris, along with the rise of the plutocrats. Cities are losing their intimate character, becoming harder places for ordinary people to exist in. And, so, yes, naturally that causes stress.
And to counter those forces you conjure up an imaginary race of avenging transsexual superhereos?
The images we use signify a fighting power. They’re characters of change, characters that remain powerful even though sometimes things have gone slightly wrong with them physically. Maybe they have too much silicone in their faces ... . Still, to us they are like contemporary goddesses fighting the status quo.
But isn’t transsexual superhero imagery out of step with prevalent practice, the making of inoffensive objects to fill booths at art fairs?
When we did the Whitney Biennial in 2004, people were expecting us to become the next Takashi Murakami. They wanted us to be slick and no politics. I’ve always done very colorful and attractive works. We dazzle with the work. But once you get into it and look closer, you start getting other messages.
Like the reference in your new paintings to anti-homosexual purges in Uganda, or the way you used controversial images of both the pope and Tom Cruise in the “Ecstasy” show at MOCA in L.A.?
At MOCA, we wanted to celebrate the birth of gay rights, which we could have done in a happy and celebratory way. But I’ve always been very inspired by gay and AIDS activist movements in the ’80s; that’s my lineage. As a gay person, you can never fully adapt to a world that is heterosexual at its base: We are an essential contradiction to many of the realities that constitute our world. Yes, you gain acceptance, more rights, but there is this sense that it’s not enough. I understand some artists now are afraid of politics. They want to sell. And when I started bringing in politics, people said the messages detracted from the work, were not that easy to digest. I mean, a giant female figure with a big phallus is never going to be absorbed into an art market environment.
And yet you went directly in that direction?
Sure. I always follow my gut.
Yet you have a passionate following among curators and collectors, collaborated with Rei Kawakubo for a piece where she and her team remixed your hard drive, are showing in the former Deitch Projects gallery in the middle of art week? And you’re showing paintings on canvas, a first. Does that suggest renegade status?
In the past, with the installations, the viewer was always the center of the piece. That’s why we used an acronym and never wanted our name on the pieces. The new work was made this way not so much for the market, but because I needed to be in the studio more, to more be meditative. The reality remains that a lot of the things Assume Vivid Astro Focus has made are not collectible and were never sold to anyone.
Do you mean the big transsexual mother doll from MOCA?
Yes, that girl has been in storage for years. She’s cost me a lot of money. I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do with her. One of these days she might end up in the trash.
