Brazilian artist João Loureiro is the creative mind behind Escala de Cinzas (Greyscale), a delectable art project blending gelato with conceptual art at MPavilion. Loureiro is known for subverting familiar objects and contexts to spark fresh perspectives on perception, consumerism, and the art market.

With Greyscale, he collaborates with beloved local gelateria Piccolina to serve six shades of grey gelato—each crafted using time-honoured Italian techniques, but tasting anything but monotone. From playful sensory disruption to metaphorical ties with Tadao Ando’s concrete pavilion, Loureiro reveals how this unique activation turns a scoop of gelato into an artful meditation on form, function, and the unexpected.

 

Where did the initial idea for Escala de Cinzas (Greyscale) come from?

In 2012 I was invited to participate in a show in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. The city’s tourism was suffering the consequences of a volcanic eruption in nearby Chile. The city was covered in ashes. I was the only Brazilian in the show and I was invited because Brazil whose large number of tourists significantly bolster the city’s economy. So, I wanted to embed the piece within a shop to convey ideas related to the relationship between the consumer and the city. The previous year I created a wooden popsicle painted in grey stripes, ascending from darker near the bottom to lighter at the top, resembling a child multi-coloured popsicle rendered in black and white. Observing habits and behaviours of the tourists related to retail locations led to the development of the piece with Jauja, a famous local ice cream shop.

Your work often subverts familiar contexts or everyday objects. What draws you to exploring these familiar spaces or objects in your work?

My interest in the ways in which familiarity with our environment leads to changes in the way we view those objects around us, particularly in the way the commonplace seems to fade into the background, often brings us aspects of both social and political meaning. This process occurs in Escala de Cinzas, a work that brings to light the economy of the art field, addressing questions of the market and the qualification of art.

What led you to choose gelato as the medium for this work?

I like the idea that you have to spend a little money to purchase a part of this larger work, a part that will melt in only a few short minutes. I guess it’s a shortcut for a critical understanding of consumerism, for the economy of the art system. You eat it, consume it; it enters your body to be processed via all types of biochemical mechanisms, wholly detached from the eyes or the brain. The lack of colour creates a brief moment of uncertainty. Without the context of colour, what am I tasting? In this moment our perception and focus are disrupted. Besides that, I like the sculptural and visual characteristics of the work – the ice cream as an infinite mass, occupying different containers, behaving organically. The refrigerated window, the display of grayscale gelato, people walking around holding colourless ice cream cones.

How do you hope audiences will respond to the sensory experience of Greyscale?

People tend to approach this piece playfully. This is expected due to the possibility of “interaction” and, of course, because it involves ice cream. There is this exchange of money for food, this “real life” fact and, then, the experience of eating it without the aid of the flavour colour. There is a small gap between the moment you taste it and its identification that breaks the experience and make it noticeable, less automatic, more conscious.

Are you familiar with Tadao Ando’s buildings? If so, how does this activation interact with or complement the space he’s created in Melbourne?

There is a clear visual connection between the shades of grey used in the ice cream and the cement building by Tadao Ando. This association opens space for diverse interpretation such as metaphorical readings of dissolution. The grey gelato can bring up the supposed neutrality attributed to grey shades used in art works. It has a demoted presence, elegant in a way, even if it turns into a mess.

What projects are you currently working on?

I spent the last months working on a series of “monsters”, sculptures made in metal and other materials. I initiated this series a couple of years ago, when Brazil was under the government of the extreme right-wing president Bolsonaro, who smashed cultural policies, favoured the destruction of the forests, negate the pandemic and tried a coup.