Past/Future/Present, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, is more than a commemorative exhibition. Conceived amid the celebrations of 70 years of creation of the museum and originally created two years ago to present the institution collection for the public of Atlanta (it is worth noting that it was the first exhibition of the MAM in North American territory), the selection offers an interesting opportunity to enjoy and reflect on important aspects of contemporary Brazilian art.

The criterion adopted by the curators Cauê Alves and Vanessa Davidson is neither chronological nor thematic. The 72 works selected for the Brazilian version, which occupy the main hall of the museum until April 21, were not chosen with the purpose of narrating or illustrating an official history of the national art nor presenting a particular trajectory of the collection. The plastic, conceptual or poetic power of the work, as well as its ability to connect with other parts of the selection, seem to have been the most important criteria of choice. This is already evident in the first work, “Notes on a Burning Scene”, by José Damasceno. This seductive panel, which recreates with hundreds of yellow pencils, the perspective image of a silhouette watching a screen, immediately arouses the sympathy of the public, as witness the frequent smile on the physiognomy of the visitors. Apprehension and formal creativity, capacity for synthesis and appropriation of unusual materials and procedures are among the preponderant aspects of this work and that echo throughout the exhibition.

As an organizing structure, the exhibition is subdivided into five blocks: The body/The social body; Mutable identities; Reimagined landscape; Impossible objects; and the Reinvention of monochrome. But such segmentation is quite porous, as the curators say already in the presentation. Thus, the same work is often linked to more than one core and often serves as a driving element between one and the other. This is the case, for example, of the sculpture/installation in marble of Laura Vinci, that makes a smooth transition between the block dedicated to the landscape and the one that presents / displays a series of investigations on the monochrome.

This segment dedicated to works that explore the power of color not in its diversity, but in its purest formal essence, is one of the most interesting of the exhibition. And not only because it brings together important works by quite different authors, such as Rosangela Rennó and Antonio Manuel. But also because it seems subtly to indicate that the attempt to associate Brazilian art with the generous and abundant use of colors would reiterate stereotypes and that one must look at the most different aspects of an art research without reducing the researches to a single central reason such as conceptual research or political engagement. Curiously, this nucleus brings together the largest number of abstract works of the show, indicating that the separation between figuration and abstraction – which marked the history of the museum in its early days – has lost its relevance today.

The identity notion, when thought broadly, seems to be the one that stands out the most in the selection and constitutes a central element to think contemporary production. Whether in the use of the body as an element of creation, or in a reinvention/investigation of the landscape as a place of synthesis of an idea of ​​nationality that always escapes through the fingers. It is interesting to note how it is present in the most distinct investigations. There’s a strong presence of works that depart from the representation or investigation of the human body as an element of creation, such as the series of videos by Lenora de Barros about the artist’s image, the touching feet with sores recreated by Efraim Almeida or even in the already classic work 50 Hours, Autorretrato Roubado, by Rochelle Costi made in the early 1990’s. But identity reflection is also present in another type of plastic investigation, as in the ironic installation Cortina de Vento – which plays with the stereotype of the Brazilian landscape as a tropical paradise filled with coconut palms – or even in the iconic series of postcards where Anna Bella Geiger contrasts images of Indians and Westerners, showing how fragile and thought-provoking is the native vs. foreign opposition.

With works created mostly in the 1990’s and 2000’s, the exhibition carefully mixes works already well-known to the public and lesser-known productions, enabling pleasant re-encounters or new surprises. In this relationship between greater and lesser visibility, another question is suggested that seems interesting to take into account: the relation of mutual dependence between artists and museums and a diminution of the own capacity of institutions like the MAM to expand their collections. There are several ways in which the collection can be seen, but – as you can see on the identification labels – the importance of donations, whether made by companies, collectors or by the artist himself, is unquestionable.

Confirming this feeling, is the exhibition that the museum dedicates to the new acquisitions of its collection, that can be seen in the Paulo Figueiredo Room. It is clear how increasingly partnerships are fundamental to expanding the capacity of museums and filling the gaps of their collection.

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Stephen Dean’s work communicates with the public in a unique way, through interpersonal relationships and context of the place. In Rehearsal with Props, on display at Casa Triângulo, the French-American artist works with dichroic glasses that have the property of displaying more than one color under certain lighting conditions. “The concept of this show parts of the permanent connection of color in my work, which is close to music”. The particularity of his work is announced in this game of transparency, saturation and the displacement of bodies. It isn’t a static look, there are displacements in space and time.

The immediate identification of the visitor with Dean’s work is with the sculpture Ladder. It is a ladder without stationary base, with dichroic glass panels, material both reflective and translucent and one of the key points of his speech. By enhancing the interiority of the glass, it creates a sort of transparent membrane where the world projects and condenses in color, as a divider between the surface of the glass and the simulated depth of the mirror. At show opening, almost no one resisted photographing themselves in front of this enigmatic sculpture that seduces the visitor by reflecting it, creating a new work with each click, with reflexivity and cross-glances. Closely seen, one can see the density and saturation of the material, the color, the attempt to recontextualize common forms.

Dean is a multimedia artist who expresses himself both in sculpture and in installations and works on paper and video, in which color enters the process as a connector, agent for changing the spatial, formal relations. “I try to keep myself in the middle of a triangle, where an angle comes to the documentary and the others to painting and video art”. With these elements he problematizes the “canvas as support-transparency”.

Contrasting with the Ladder, the Atlas series seems more like cabinet work, a collection of small watercolors, which he calls “spontaneous work sketches” and which have the ability to expand color boundaries by mixing paintings on transparent paper from cigarette. “It’s a very tough material that supports light and is used by NASA”. With this kind of paper you can roll a joint and, with humor, Dean calls it “dichroic marijuana”. The little drawings are like preparatory sketches, very spontaneous, almost like gestures, motivated by landscapes, abstract elements, simple things that form a kaleidoscope that does not end. The painting with a saturated surface is populated with “flattened” images, grouped in sets of five pieces arranged on a showcase table. These small rectangles can be articulated in various ways, with different patterns and translate unique, ethereal moments.

Dean promotes the reinvention of preexisting forms or events in various materials, with glass as the pendulum element in his speeches from the very beginning of the art. This flexible material molds itself into oversized spaces such as facades, shop windows or windows, as it did now in a renowned store in a mall in São Paulo. Dean prioritizes the intrinsic qualities of material and fluid changes to arrive at the temporal transience of the observed world. Color is the most important element in his work, even before the language to understand ideas. His work speaks of the breaking of the univocal look and summons other retinas to translate daily systems and new sensory associations. These compromises with color and perception, the recontextualization of usual forms, become a way of encouraging new and challenging ways of seeing objects approaching other challenges.

The artist, of French mother and American father, has work both in collections of museums in the United States and France. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Whitney Museum of Art, N.Y; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; at the Fonds National D ‘Art Contemporain, Paris, France; at the Jumex Foundation, Mexico.

“I always referred to my language as ‘my alphabet’”, says Anna Maria Maiolino, 76 years old, during a conversation at the Luisa Strina Gallery, where she had an exhibition until March 23. The artist has just inaugurated a show at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, in Milan. In September, Anna will present a large exhibition at Whitechapell Gallery in London, organized in partnership with the Italian institution. Recently the artist presented a show at MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles.

It is a busy year for the artist, who says she is reading the book My Alphabet, by the Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva. A friend told her about this book in the late 1990s, but only now Anna has been able to enjoy the pages. “I really like to read philosophy, because it’s a form of feeding the imagination. In this case, my imagination”, she declares. Surrounded by lines and dots, striking signs in her work, a passage from the book echoes: “Printed in me, the alphabet triumphs; everything around me is an alphabet”.

Lines and dots, whether in ink, pen or structural cement; the eggs in the performance Entrevidas or in the strip of cloth that covers the body in In ATTO, are elements that represent, for her, “the first breath of the idea that connects the work with the world”, especially when in drawing, what she calls “the first manifestation of Anna”. It is a type of alphabet that does not need the code in word, it is an post-word, something that comes before the word.

It is always important to point out the migratory issues in the life of the artist and to realize how important the elements of her work were important for her communication with the other, given that for some time she felt the need to belong to a place, and language is part of this. After all, Anna left Calabria for Venezuela and then for Brazil, but also lived in other places over the years, as in Argentina and the United States. Despite the differences in idioms, her language in art has been and is universal. So is ‘her alphabet’.

At another point in Kristeva’s book, the author reflects: “The alphabet revived in me, for me, that I could be all letters”. Identifying her language as her alphabet, it is certain that the letters that make up the abecedary of Maiolino today are intrinsic to her, who never bothered to remain static and had no fear, for example, to depart from figuration. The art process, for her, has always been something to build and deconstruct, which she calls, in an interview for the book Anna Maria Maiolino (Cosac Naify, 2012), “an active state of transformative meditation.”

It is in this way that the alphabet of Maiolino becomes plural and infinite, in the measure that still wants to develop and explore ways. To keep doing this, she wants to rest a little and think of other things: “Obviously you do not forget in your memory what you did previously, because everything is inside you. The artist is a product of various stratifications of culture. Then you do not escape of the thick memory, within you and within all that has already been done”.

For a brief distance that allows her new perspectives, the artist has thought of not doing more retrospective exhibitions for some time. In addition, she plans to keep a regular distance between individual exhibitions she does in galleries that represent her: “I want to have fun experimenting: seeing what this new Anna is at 76”.