What can art? Hudinilson Junior always did what he wanted and the answer to this irreverence was to become a point outside the curve within the universe of Brazilian art. His trajectory is marked by the collapse of the subject, explosion of the relation with the object and radicalization of performances. With sophisticated poetic vigor, coupled with bodily and relational experiences, Hudinilson left a production closely linked to São Paulo, whether in performances, graffiti or art in xerox.
Many of his works emerge in search of the simultaneity between thought and visuality, as in the day when he surprised the city with the image of his penis xeroxed in a huge billboard, near the Ibirapuera Park. The reactions provoked by the boldness pointed to the dismantling of the hierarchies of the exhibition space, destruction of the power of location of the work and at the same time revealed the irreverence of the subject.
Every movement to trigger disruption runs through the works that now take the 600 square meters of the gallery Jaqueline Martins, whose owner is also the curator of the show. The novelties are the paintings on canvas, made when the artist was still an art student in the 1970s. A curious tension permeates the plurality of the work by Hudinilson, one of the pioneers of the xerox art movement in Brazil. Best character in his own work, in creating Exercício de me ver (1981), he disorganized critical thinking by simulating the sexual act with a xerox machine. It is intriguing to follow it in this experimentation by producing other meanings for man and machine. How not to remember Hélio Oiticica when he sentenced: “to try the experimental”? Hudinilson expresses himself, without shame, by means of several languages which, in some circumstances, becomes an instrument of speculation. For the critic Jean-Claude Bernardet, “the fragmentation of the body by the xerox, converts it into abstract landscapes, in which the fragments fade away”. In his performance with the copying machine, he uses his body as a matrix for the reproduction and investigation of visual possibilities.
In 1979, Hudinilson created the group 3Nós3, with the artists Rafael França and Mário Ramiro. The union by elective affinities was of friends who agreed art and form of making art. Until 1982 they intervened in several points of São Paulo, practicing the recreational and critical reappropriation of the city. The repertoire of actions ranges from the bagging of public monuments to intervention in the breathing hole of a tunnel, to the sealing of art gallery doors. All understood as a revolutionary mark against the rationalist and controlling determinations of the metropolis. Even acting with the group, he never gives up his individual production that lasts more than three decades.
From the beginning, Hudinilson maintains a strong relationship with collage, starting point for a commentator phase. To this are added experiments in the woodcut, support by which most of the Brazilian artists experienced, using decals of photographic images. Hudinilson spent long hours picking nude body photos taken from American magazines. In 1984, he abandoned these models and focused all his attention around himself when he dedicated himself to Narciso/Estudo para Autorretrato (1984). In this “essay” he dialogues with the myth of Narcissus and creates his own visual identity. The project involves a series of works, like a sort of “opera”. Narcissus becomes an obsession for him who, in the last notebooks of collages, reveals his interest in the study of the male nude.
In the 1980s, Hudinilson’s place for art is the street, where he invents graffiti with drawings embedded in writing, claiming a space for total freedom. His mentor and accomplice, Alex Vallauri (1949-1987), was the first Brazilian artist to adhere to graphite. Like him, Hudinilson works with masks or stencils in the search for a new formal space to create, a resistance in vain, as if some naturalness in art were possible.
In life Hudinilson saved himself from experiencing the illusory vertigo of belonging to the art market and participating in internationalization through repetitive marathons of fairs and biennials. It was only after his death that his work reached the exterior and he landed in June at Art Basel, Switzerland, the oldest and most revered art fair in the world.
