Page 99 - ARTE!Brasileiros #45

Rio de Janeiro, under federal intervention from the beginning of this year, is possibly EXHIBITION SÃO PAULO | PAGES 50 TO 52
surprising that two shows were inaugurated last September exploring wounds that TO BREATHE FREEDOM, 70
where these contradictions become more clearly visible, and it is therefore not
usually the police or politics pages, not the culture: Arte Democracia Utopia - Those YEARS OF THE DECLARATION
who do not fight are dead (until 05/2019), in the Rio Art Museum and With the air
too heavy to breathe (20/09 to 24/11), in the new headquarters of Athena gallery. OF HUMAN RIGHTS
They are very different exhibitions, an institutional one, fruit of a long
research of the curator Moacir of the Angels, another commercial, but with CONCEIVED BY SESC / SÃO PAULO AND THE VLADIMIR HERZOG INSTITUTE, THE
a process of construction that started of a provocation of Lisette Lagnado. EXHIBITION OF THE ARTIST OTÁVIO ROTH (1952-1993) IS A RAIN OF RESISTANCE
“As the news has reached its daily life” the curator asked each of the artists IN THE STORM THAT SEATS US
represented by the gallery, who “lived their majority during the period in which the
country had a left government that assumed as a program the reduction of misery BY LEONOR AMARANTE
and hunger “, according to his finding in the text that accompanies the exhibition.
With this strategy, the exposure reaches a temperature sometimes even documentary, THE IMMENSE TREE which takes up the entire lobby of Sesc Bom Retiro creates in the spectator
which presents a complex picture of the current situation. There are references to the a visual frenzy with the exhaustive repetition of small leaves of paper, with a color and
fire that destroyed the National Museum of Quinta da Boa Vista, in Rio, in the work of transparency that reverberate different luminous games in space, depending on the floor in
Frederico Filippi, with the air too heavy to breathe, that gives title to the show, composed which the spectator is. This monumental 400-square-meter facility, which reaches the four
of sheets of steel covered by black ink, superposed by his turn for drawings and blank floors of the building, opens the exhibition To Breathe Freedom-70 Years of the Declaration
scribbles. It is as if the waste from the fire were contained there. Almost beside, Andre of Human Rights by artist Otávio Roth.
Griffo’s painting, The Provider’s Room, which represents a museum space with portraits Artist of many resources, drawing, engraving, photography, he completely changed his
of “benefactors”, reinforces the critique of a white elite, who seems unscathed to reality. work from the murder of Vladimir Herzog, in the premises of DOI-Codi, in October 1975, in
The political question, however, appears more explicitly in works by Lais Myrrha, Matheus São Paulo. After this episode he stopped making films and cartoons to dedicate himself
Rocha Pitta and Vanderlei Lopes. His is Democracy is a myth, a bronze sculpture painted to the art of social content. All that he sought in his work was in the epigraph of the dead
with gouache, where you can see a newspaper whose headline is the name of the work journalist, summed up in the phrase: “defense of human rights”.
next to the image of a bus on fire, and the work was also lightly burned. At the time of The tree conceived in Sesc with unusual three-dimensional construction reconstructed in
fake news, partisan media and manipulated elections, sculpture is the synthesis of 2018. the form of a large mobile was specially designed for the internal atrium, by the architect
Along with the 12 artists represented by the gallery - most of them created works for the Pedro Mendes da Rocha. In other two-dimensional formats, the work has already been
show - Lagnado gathered a team of “historians” such as Antonio Dias, Antonio Manuel, done in some countries, according to the architecture of the space. The collective execution
Rubens Gerchman, Artur Barrio and Letícia Parente, among others, who in the 1960s in São Paulo was attended by 70 thousand young people from various public and private
and 1970s also produced works absolutely back to their time, like the bloody Muggles schools, during a two-month workshop. Conceived by Roth, who participated in the initial
of 1970. With this, the curator points to the cyclical times of art, politics and society montages, the work remains alive even after his death, multiplying by the hands of thousands
itself, after all, a necessary distance for those who live the barbarism of the present day. of students. Names, ages, country of origin, all of them, are in sheets that can be consulted
At MAR (Rio Art Museum), Moacir dos Anjos follows the series of exhibitions during the exhibition period.
that began in 2009 in the project of Art Policy at Joaquim Nabuco Foundation in In São Paulo, the critic Fábio Magalhães, and the daughter of the artist Isabel Roth, signed
Recife. Since then, the curator has organized several exhibitions that work on this the curatorship while the project is by Pedro Mendes da Rocha. Active and engaged, the
issue, whether in commercial galleries or institutional spaces. “Arte Democracia artist put all his graphic experience at the service of the fight for human rights. Collaborative
Utopia - Those who do not fight are dead” seem to me the greatest of them and, work, one of its brands, gave life to a pulsating horizontal work. Many Brazilian artists
given the current conditions, a city under intervention, that after 8 months did have engaged in political issues. “Since the 1930s, Di Cavalcanti had been producing for
not solve the murder of Marielle Franco and Anderson Pedro Gomes, and of a the press illustrations that criticized fascism. Portinari showed the drama of misery and
country divided in one election after the parliamentary coup, the strongest of all. exalted the strength of the worker and his human qualities, “recalls Magalhães. During the
This context increases the tension, of course, and Moacir was able to bring this period of the dictatorship came some seminal works, such as the work / performance Who
temperature of the streets and networks to the show, including from Laerte strips to the Killed Herzog? From Cildo Meirelles. It is a “stamp in which the question was applied in the
actions of the collective #coleraealegria. With this, the healer points to limiting situations, notes of money, denouncing the lie and the violence of the repressive apparatus of the
where it does not matter so much where the action comes from, but the importance dictatorship”. Still on the same theme Magalhães speaks of the painter Antonio Henrique
of using language in new ways. In this sense, the presence of Claudia Andujar, an artist Amaral with the screen Death on Saturday, made in the heat of the fight.
always included in the exhibitions of the curator, becomes a precursor, since her work Roth died prematurely at age 42, lived in Israel, England, Norway, the United States, and in
with the Indians has never been concerned with art itself, but with the defense of a cause. those countries developed his technique as a tape recorder and his interest in political issues.
The panorama constructed by Moacir is ample: there are more than 50 artists and In Oslo, where he lived for three years, he created in woodcut the first illustrated series of
collectives, who occupy an entire floor of the museum and present different poetic the Declaration of Human Rights, in Norwegian and later made in English, composed of 30
aspects. It is being shown Apelo, the visceral video about the death of adolescents by pieces and which also composes the exhibition. In 1981 the English version was adopted by
police in the outskirts of São Paulo seen at the Bienal de São Paulo in 2014, to a new the UN and since then remains on display in Geneva, Vienna and New York.
version of Rio Utópico, by Rosângela Rennó, seen before at Instituto Moreira Salles. In addition to the active political contribution, Otavio Roth created in 1979 the Handmade, the
The exhibition, however, gains by questioning the very structure of the institution, first handmade paper workshop in the country, with the aim of producing paper for artistic use
since structures were built on glass walls that limit entry into MAR, allowing with quality. In search of new discoveries, he even works at the IPT (Institute of Technological
it to be possible to enter the museum in another way, at the same time that Research) in 1982, the same year that he exhibits at Masp and MAM, Rio, the first exhibition on
this new space is occupied both by debates and by collectives who so desire. the nature of paper. Roth was interested in the work of Ben Shan, master of the North American
The exhibition space itself also contains an area for meetings, and it is because of this engraving and that of Robert Rauschenberg, linked to pop art. With a differentiated graphic design,
type of reception that the show differs from a conventional exhibition. It is not just he executes for the Brazilian Committee of Amnesty a calendar made in print with the thought
a compendium of art and politics, but rather a space for practicing art and politics. of Charles Chaplin, Che Guevara, Saint Agostino, Carlos Marighela and others.

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