Page 95 - ARTE!Brasileiros #46

who preceded him, like his master Guignard (whose indications secured him state marked by several crises, Farnese echoes in each of them in a subjective
employment as an illustrator in several publications when he moved to Rio in way. However, it inevitably stirs intensely with feelings that go far beyond reason.
1946 to cure himself of a tuberculosis). However, the drive force of his work, the
ability to deal with the torments and intimate agonies (not only his own but also
of modern man in general) makes him closer to the contemporary art developed EXHIBITION SÃO PAULO | PAGES 72 AND 73
Instead of considering the two-dimensional and three-dimensional productions STEPHEN DEAN, THE
by succeeding generations than of his contemporaries.
of the artist as watertight blocks, Mattar’s curators try to smash the boundaries COLOR AS A CONNECTION
between languages, illuminating and putting into dialogue some of the most
striking moments of this trajectory. “One thing is contained within the other. OF THE LOOK
The Farnese of the 1990s are contained in the Farnese of the 1960s, “she argues.
Leaving aside a rigid chronology, the visitor is presented to families of works, THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ARTIST WORKS DICROIC GLASS WITH
to moments marked in their trajectory. He always has before him an artist who SATURATION, REFLEXIVITY AND TRANSPARENCY.
seems to be constantly testing himself and his plastic, symbolic, metaphorical
possibilities. BY LEONOR AMARANTE
The oldest works of the exhibition constitute a nucleus disposed more at the
bottom of the gallery. Here are the compulsive and intricate designs he said STEPHEN DEAN’S WORK COMMUNICATES with the public in a unique way, through
he did to “call sleep” and were called “Obsessive”; a well-behaved copy of the interpersonal relationships and context of the place. In Rehearsal with Props, on
erotic phase he developed in the late 1960s; and one of three drawings, called display at Casa Triângulo, the French-American artist works with dichroic glasses
“Censorship”, in which he makes an acid and ironic comment about the period that have the property of displaying more than one color under certain lighting
of repression and gives an answer to the confiscation and destruction by the conditions. “The concept of this show parts of the permanent connection of color
military of the works that he had sent to the 2 nd Biennial of Bahia two years in my work, which is close to music”. The particularity of his work is announced
earlier. These pieces guaranteed Farnese the Travel Prize at the Modern Art Hall in this game of transparency, saturation and the displacement of bodies. It isn’t
of 1970, taking it to Europe, where it remained for the next five years. a static look, there are displacements in space and time.
Two other important sets of two-dimensional works were panned by the show. The immediate identification of the visitor with Dean’s work is with the sculpture
The first of these is composed of 24 paintings made between 1963 and 1980. Ladder. It is a ladder without stationary base, with dichroic glass panels, material
In addition to demonstrating his versatility - “he did everything at the same both reflective and translucent and one of the key points of his speech. By
time”, Denise says -, this huge panel highlights some of the artist’s interests as a enhancing the interiority of the glass, it creates a sort of transparent membrane
fascination with the sensuality of the human body (not just homoerotic) and their where the world projects and condenses in color, as a divider between the surface
ability to reinvent ways of making art. In these cases, for example, he develops a of the glass and the simulated depth of the mirror. At show opening, almost no
particular technique, which he calls “transformed paint” and which consists of one resisted photographing themselves in front of this enigmatic sculpture that
the application of watercolor mixed with a secret chemical on the wrong side of seduces the visitor by reflecting it, creating a new work with each click, with
the already painted canvas, transferring to the work color spots and seductive reflexivity and cross-glances. Closely seen, one can see the density and saturation
forms , on which it had only partial control. The second is a set of monotypes of the material, the color, the attempt to recontextualize common forms.
made from objects found on the seashore or in landfills in the early 1960s and Dean is a multimedia artist who expresses himself both in sculpture and in
soon to be incorporated into their three-dimensional collages. installations and works on paper and video, in which color enters the process
Started in 1964 and produced ceaselessly until his death in 1996, these pieces as a connector, agent for changing the spatial, formal relations. “I try to keep
that gather wormwood; doll carcasses; saints of popular devotion; objects myself in the middle of a triangle, where an angle comes to the documentary
collected in antique shops, garbage or on the streets; shells found at random or and the others to painting and video art”. With these elements he problematizes
images inherited from an uncle photographer form the body of the exhibition. the “canvas as support-transparency”.
They are embalmed in a resinous environment, enclosed in oratories that they Contrasting with the Ladder, the Atlas series seems more like cabinet work, a
adopt at the time they live in Barcelona, protected by glass beads or sheltered collection of small watercolors, which he calls “spontaneous work sketches”
in the hollows of the traditional wooden troughs used in the popular cuisine of and which have the ability to expand color boundaries by mixing paintings on
their native Minas Gerais, these compositions at the same time agonizing and transparent paper from cigarette. “It’s a very tough material that supports light and
seductive times - of an impressive formal preciosity - seem, as Mattar says, to is used by NASA”. With this kind of paper you can roll a joint and, with humor, Dean
“paralyze time”. calls it “dichroic marijuana”. The little drawings are like preparatory sketches, very
The themes are recurrent. There are annunciations, dives in affective memories spontaneous, almost like gestures, motivated by landscapes, abstract elements,
related to paternal and maternal figures, a long series of works titled “We come simple things that form a kaleidoscope that does not end. The painting with a
from the sea”, and other fields of research to which it returns in an obsessive saturated surface is populated with “flattened” images, grouped in sets of five
and compulsive way, as in an effort of purging and organization internal. There is pieces arranged on a showcase table. These small rectangles can be articulated
something lugubrious, nostalgic, in this return to the past, that reopen wounds, in various ways, with different patterns and translate unique, ethereal moments.
leave feelings on display. As Charles Cosac well defined in the opening text of Dean promotes the reinvention of preexisting forms or events in various materials,
the catalog, “he fed himself nostalgia”. with glass as the pendulum element in his speeches from the very beginning of
And it infects us in this process. His pieces put to the flower of his skin emotions the art. This flexible material molds itself into oversized spaces such as facades,
that should be buried, especially in a country that bet on the univocal way, shop windows or windows, as it did now in a renowned store in a mall in São Paulo.
redemptive of an art of right angles and abstract symbols, leaving behind their Dean prioritizes the intrinsic qualities of material and fluid changes to arrive at the
feet of clay, their wood gnawed by termites, a strange sensuality and his beheaded temporal transience of the observed world. Color is the most important element
saints. In telling his stories, marked by terrible collective memories like the in his work, even before the language to understand ideas. His work speaks of the
drowning of his two brothers some years before his birth and by a depressive breaking of the univocal look and summons other retinas to translate daily systems

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