Few artists can update the radicality of Brazilian artistic production, where the body was part of the work, in the 1960s and 1970s, as Ernesto Neto. This is what can be seen in the Sopro show, which is on display at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo until July 15.

In his works and in an original way, Neto manages to gather both the proposals of collective experiences of Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1990) in his Penetráveis, when he sought to create spaces for coexistence, as to the activations of the body through experiments with different materials, such as proposed Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988) in her Objetos Relacionais.

However, whereas 50 years ago these practices sought to reformulate the foundations of art, Neto, already free of this burden, has been working on a more current and necessary agenda: a “project of indigenization of life” in the definition of Els Lagrou, anthropologist and teacher of UFRJ, in the show catalog.

At the Pinacoteca, this practice is embodied in the installation of the octagon, Cura Bra Cura Té, which hosts five participatory activations open to the public throughout the exhibition period. The next ones take place on June 29 and July 13.

The relationship between the artist and the indigenous issue has been the subject of debate in recent years, especially when he participated in the Venice Biennale two years ago. The controversies are summarized in the question: What is the legitimacy of a white artist to appropriate the discourse of other peoples and cultures? Understanding the place of speech is currently one of the challenges of any kind of discourse that seeks to “represent” the other.

1 de 2

Undoubtedly it is a bit strange when artists portray themselves as Indians and sell or expose these paintings without any major commitment to the issue. We are there in the field of mere representation, and it was exactly against this kind of posture that Oiticica and Clark rebelled.

Since 2013, however, Neto has been involved with the huni kuin people in Acre in an engaged way, participating in their rituals and incorporating them to their shows, in Brazil and abroad, as happened in Venice.

This participation, in Sopro, occurs in the octagon, in the activations around a large trunk “that needs to be cured” and, for that, is swallowed by an immense pendant.

“We are children of three continents, but we know of one, they only teach us one, we value only one”, writes Neto on the walls of the show, explaining the dazzle with the European culture of the “Brazilian crudes”, as Christian Dunker brilliantly defined in text published in ARTE!Brasileiros digital plataform.

“The time has come to listen to the spirituality of our land, our plants, rivers and trees, the time has come to listen”, argues the artist. It is here that this project of indigenization is made explicit, since the so-called forest peoples seek the intrinsically relational quality of every being, human and not human, what Lagrou defines as “Amerindian relational aesthetics.”

“It’s time to listen to pajés, babalorixás, yororixas”, says Neto, and the programming of activations covers these silenced voices in the history of Brazil, but which in recent decades has been gaining space. They are now at the Pinacoteca not only as a proposition of the artist, but as a consequence of the struggle that these people have been engaging.

Breath, however, goes far beyond the octagon and, in the various spaces where it occurs, reveals how it makes sense in Neto’s career the poetics he now defends.

This harmony with an indigenist cosmogony, where human and nonhuman are seen as part of a whole, after all is central in its various facilities, which ask for the presence of the other, that contaminate the environment with odors, that facilitate the encounter, that touch, caress and envelop.

The plasticism seen in the works of the 1980s to the first decade of the 21st century is dazzling: in forms, materials, volumes and dimensions. There is an organic structure in its language comfortable to all senses, which is even rare in contemporary art. But the maximum power now arrives in this “indigenist project”, politicizing what was discreet at once, and transforming Ernesto Neto into a kind of shaman in times of cholera.

At the  Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) in São Paulo, two exhibitions dedicated to important foreign photographers: the Italian Letizia Battaglia (1935) and the Chilean Sergio Larrain (1931-2012).

Letizia Battaglia: Palermo show brings together about 90 images, publications and films, with a special focus on the photographer’s performance in the L’Ora newspaper. She began her work as a photographer in 1971 in Milan, while writing as a freelancer for various publications, such as Le Ore, a tabloid newspaper and ABC, an intellectual publication. She was invited by L’Ora to return to Palermo, where she had been born, and it was during four decades that she documented the mafia war, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. This all without ignoring the daily life of the city and its inhabitants.

In the words of the photographer, “with the camera in tow, I became a witness of all the evil that was taking place. They were years of civil war: Sicilians against Sicilians. The best judges, the most courageous journalists, the politicians averse to corruption were murdered”. With curatorship by Paolo Falcone, the exhibition has already gone through Palermo, Rome and the IMS in Rio before arriving in São Paulo.

The exhibition Sergio Larrain: um retângulo na mão, traces a panorama of the work by the Chilean, who acted as correspondent of the Magnum agency during the 1960s. The exhibition presents more than 140 photographs, a video and publications, contemplating the periods of production of Larrain in Santiago, work as correspondent in Europe and South America and his return to the native land. Under the auspices of Agnès Sire, the exhibition has already passed through Arles, France, in several Chilean cities, Buenos Aires and IMS in Rio.

1 de 4

Fotos: Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photo

In this version that is at the IMS, was added the work that Larrain did in the second half of the 1950s for the Brazilian magazine Cruzeiro Internacional, ran by Assis Chateaubriand. Owner of the magazine Cruzeiro – successful publication and responsible for the implantation of the photojournalism here with photographers like Jose Medeiros, Pierre Verger, Luiz Carlos Barreto, Marcel Gautherot -, Chateaubriand when launching its international version wanted to compete with American magazine Life and with the French magazine Paris Match.

The magazine was launched in 1957, Larrain produced for her little more than a dozen reports between 1957 and 1959. He was then invited by Cartier-Bresson to work at Magnum in Paris. The Cruzeiro Internacional ended in 1965 due to lack of advertisers.

In France, Sergio Larrain, who was a friend of Julio Cortázar, one day revealing the films he had made through the streets of Paris saw, in the background in a photo, a couple. He widened the negative and saw that the couple made love, leaning against a wall. He met later with the Argentine writer and showed him the magnification. The photo served as inspiration for the tale Las babas del diablo, one of five published in 1959 in the book Las armas secretas. The tale, in turn, inspired the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni who made the now classic and inspiring Blow-Up.

In Sire’s words, the curator of the show, who has worked at Magnum since 1982 and is director and founder of the Cartier-Bresson Foundation, “for Larrain photography was poetry, it was by no means a documentary issue”.

In a letter he wrote to a nephew in 1982, Sergio Larrain said: “Follow your taste and nothing else, believe only in your taste… When you have some really good pictures, enlarge and make a small exhibition – or a little book. Have it bound. And with that, set your foot on a floor. By showing them, you realize what they are by seeing them in front of others – that is where you feel them. To make an exhibition is to give something, it is like giving food, it is good for others to show them something done with work and taste. It is not showing off, doing well done is healthy for everyone”.

A striking feature of David Magila’s work, simultaneity seems to have an effect on his calendar as well. With three exhibitions inaugurating one after the other in the month of May 2019, the artist makes a striking entrance into São Paulo’s scene. They are three different spaces and with different vocations, in which it exposes a wide range of works, almost all of them unpublished, which together make up a very comprehensive panorama of the main issues that motivate it.

“It was a result of chance”, he explains, emphasizing that each of these shows has its own history, but without denying the existence of important links between the different expository hubs. The first of these projects happened in the garden of the mansion occupied by the Ema Klabin Foundation. It was conceived in the context of the Festival Labas, an initiative of the Lithuanian community in São Paulo, and led the artist to immerse himself in the history of his family, in the affective and symbolic memory linked to the locksmith’s place ran by his grandfather, who took refuge in Brazil in the 1930s, and where he learned the craft by welding bins.

The second show, which opened at the British Cultural Center, was marked by a dialogue with the British artist Hurvin Anderson. It encompasses not only paintings – language that the artist has been exploring more hard in recent times – but also sculptures, drawings and videos. Recent works of his own have also been exhibited in individual exhibitions at Galeria Janaina Torres. These last two hubs of works reveal, by means of a subtle yet intense dialogue, the at once fluid and coherent character of his poetics.

In Magila’s works there always seems to be a farther, more remote, starting point than the first appearances indicate. His painting, despite the ethereal character, is not an invented construction. The inanimate objects and scenes that emanate these constructions always derive from scenes of reality, which the artist collects as an explorer, usually in decadent and abandoned places, and recorded by photographs or drawings of observation.

This careful record of landscapes and details is part of your process. Graduated in arts by Unesp in the early 2000s and often as one of the highlights of the young Brazilian painting, Magila has a very diversified trajectory, marked by moments of exclusive dedication to graphic design and the search for an association between different forms of expression artistic

Empty chairs, debris from bars, umbrellas not only populate his screens creating a somewhat nostalgic scene, but also serve as a structure for the entire composition. “I do not paint the object, I paint around it”, he explains. The empty architecture, the deserted environments are their theme. They never see human traces in them, but we know they’ve been there. Magila confesses interest for places that have the mark of a certain experience, places that feed a series of works. This is the case, for example, of a beach in Iguape, which is being eaten by the sea and which is the source of several of the works shown in the British Center. In several visits to the site he collected not only scenes, but objects engulfed by the sea (any relation to an impulse of ecological denunciation would not be mere coincidence), later transforming these spoils into a large facility.

Despite the chromatic power of the screens, it is always from the drawing that the image is structured, in a series of re-readings to the final form. The mixture of techniques, the influence of his formations in technical drawing (by the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts) and the experience as graphic artist – area in which he worked for a long time – leave their marks in the work. And they contribute to create this feeling of a composition that does not necessarily seek a definitive harmony, but rather to promote the coexistence, somewhat ambiguous, of elements only seemingly disparate. His paintings seduce and defy the senses at the same time.

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.

F THE MEETING BETWEEN THE RESEARCHERS OF THE CURRICULATORS Bitu Cassundé, Clarissa Diniz and Marcelo Campos was born a great desire to carry out a project for an exhibition that would bring together works representing the northeastern Brazil not in its caricature form, but in its totality, entering the imaginaries in  around him.  The project for this was already about ten years old when, almost two years ago, it was approved by Sesc to be held in the unit 24 de Maio.  Thus, the three curators began to travel through all the states that compose the northeast region to update these researches.  The result can now be seen in the exhibition Northeast, until August 25.

The trips for updating began in the second half of 2018, said Marcelo and Clarissa.  Some of them were made in trio, others in pairs and others only one of them can carry out.  “The project is the vitality of the region, which showed us other things, not just what we already knew”, says Campos.  He says that the trips coincided with a very pulsating moment of the Northeast, due to the political scenario of the last presidential elections.  This has made the energy of contem- porary new artists stand out in some way.  The moment was also very important for them to observe a series of transformations that had taken place in the region during the last years.  The curators were careful not to fall into a trap that is too easy to slip when it comes to the region: the folklore: “We said that it was not our intention to make a picture of the region, nor a panorama.  At no point did we do, for example, a statistic”, commented Marcelo.  In this way, the curators were allowed to cross for subjects that were triggered, in the end, in nuclei of the exhibition.  They are: Future, Insurgency,  (non) Coloniality, Work, Nature, City, Desire and Language.

1 de 6

At the same time, the exhibition was not conceived in a way that escaped the prejudices that are directed to the region and showing them is also a way of not normalizing them: “These prejudices are part of a northeastern experience”, Clarissa points out, explaining that the encounter is provocative and stirs up a series of concepts and prejudices.  In the Nordeste region, there are 275 works by 160 artists, among them, such as Retirantes, by Cândido Portinari, who is part of the MASP collection, and the Manto de Apresentaçào, by Arthur Bispo do Rosário.  More contemporary artists with heavy works, such as Juliana Notari, who presents the video Mimoso in the Desire sector, are also very present in the web constructed by the curators.  One of the highlights is Memelito’s work, from the collective Saquinho de Lixo, which appeared as a memes page in social networks.  The video brings a series of images known on the internet.  Also very contemporary, Gabriel Mascaro’s work is not about shoes, reflects on the issues surrounding the demonstrations that have taken place in the country in recent years, taking as a point of discussion the manifestations of 2013, which began a more latent process of participation  – tion of the population in the direction of the country.  For the exhibition, were commissioned 12 unpublished works, such as  A gente combinamos de não morrer, 2019, by Jota Mombasa (cover of this issue).  The commissioning was, according to Marcelo, a way of breaking the vericalization of art.  In addition to Mombaça, artists such as Daniel Santiago (PE), Gê Vianna and Márcia Ribeiro (MA), Ton Bezerra (MA), Isabela Stampanoni (PE), Pêdra Costa (RN), Marie Carangi  Alves (PE) also carried out new work.

SESC MAY DE MAIO

Located in a very central region of the city of São Paulo, where thousands of migrants and immigrants pass by, SESC 24 de Maio has a very strong geopolitical character in its roots.  The unit was inaugurated in 2017 and has hosted major exhibitions celebrating what comes from outside of Sao Paulo, such as Jamaica Jamaica, which focuses on Jamaican culture and politics, and Lasar Segall: essay on color, which presented a great  collected from works by the Lithuanian artist living in Brazil.

Watch the video on À Nordeste exposure: