Sculpture (Sculpture)

A series of works from 2016 document his neighborhood, replicating buildings and businesses he frequents within four blocks of his New York apartment. Made out of foam, paper, glue, and paint, these miniaturized buildings (a bank, a bar, a Laundromat, and the Rite Aid building where Buffon shops) impart a tenderness and a nostalgia that outsizes their diminutive scale. Like works by other artists who recreate objects or elements from their everyday life, Buffon’s storefronts are perfectly imperfect, the wobbled lines reiterating their handmade quality.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.

Installation (Installation)

In the 1980’s, while browsing Parisian fleamarkets, Barbara Bloom stumbled into an anonymous watercolor (dating to around 1960) in one of Paris’ fleamarkets, probably a study made by an interior designer for a bedroom. The artist found the image to be typically Parisian. The watercolor, framed under a mat made of cardboard, had color tests on its margin, elements that Bloom discovered when she raised it.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other. During World War II, the Walt Disney Company produced series of cartoon shorts that featured Donald Duck’s nightmare of working in an inhumane artillery factory in Nazi Germany and serving in the U. S. Army. By animating and normalizing war and military life, these cartoons not only achieved widespread popularity, but functioned as government propaganda.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jeep Comics is based on the second of only two issues published by RB Leffingwell and Company in 1944–45. Though largely unknown, their protagonists, Jeep and Peep, embody the ethos of “Golden Age” comic books in which magically empowered heroes triumph over evils to boost patriotic enthusiasm.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Many of Araujo’s works depict reproductions and Libro Ponti II is a recreation of a book on Italian architect Gio Ponti. Ponti designed the Villa Planchart a private, modernist house in Caracas, Venezuela, which at the time it was built in 1956, reflected the emergence of a class increasingly globalized, both culturally and economically. Araujo’s replica of the book thus refers to the role and visibility of Venezuela in circuits of global cultural production.