A detour to Chapada

Por

-

30 de abril de 2019

IMG_6477_A casa na árvore em ALTO — Na Página anterior, ALTO, residência artística criada por Marianne Soisalo, localizado nas montanhas de Alto Paraíso de Goiás.

It was thanks to the Stanley Kubrick’s film “Eyes Closed” (1999) that a Brazilian of Finnish family Marianne Soisalo created one of the most radical artistic residences amid the exuberant nature of Alto Paraíso de Goiás mountains, 230 km from Brasilia, in the Chapada dos Veadeiros.

Living in London in the 1990’s, Mari, as she is called by her friends, was one of the owners of the cabaret Madame Jojo, who was rented by Kubrick to record one of the scenes from his film when the character played by Tom Cruise meets his musician friend.

“With the money from the rent, she bought the land where the residence now operates”, says artist Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, who since last year has shared the responsibility for the ALTO residence with Mari.

Although the film was shot at the end of the last century, the land in Alto Paraíso was acquired only in 2008 and construction began in 2011. In the meantime, Mari, an environmental activist with a master’s degree in zoology from Cambridge University, slept in Bruce, her Land Rover, when she was in the region.

At the site, she had two houses built on separate trees, planned and built by a German specialist, one of them 30 meters high. The view from there is breathtaking, with blue macaws flying over the area. These homes are the home base of the Mariri Jungle Lodge, a creative home and a permaculture project space. It was along with the artist Karolina Daria Flora and the Spanish artist Rafael Perez Evans, currently living in London, that she created the ALTO, receiving artists both by subscribing to www.altoartresidency.com and by invitation, which has been organized by Dutra and Mariana Bassani.

The artist went to live in Alto Paraiso in 2017 to work at the Art and Education Institute of Goiás Department of Education and operate with art in public schools and a settlement of the Sem Terra. “After five months in the public service I decided to leave, and since I was in contact with Mari, I ended up getting involved in the residence”, says Dutra. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014, he returned to Brazil to attend the Histórias Mestiças show the same year at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, and eventually became involved with the Huni Kuin Indians, who were there for a ritual of ayahuasca in the work of Ernesto Neto. “Because of this tea, I decided to go back to Brazil”, explains the artist.

ALTO is a very private residence, with an open stay, because it’s aimed at artists who are involved with the land and with sustainability. This is the case, for example, of the English writer Olivia Sprinkel, who will spend some time there in the coming months, writing about global warming.

However, it’s not only activists who are invited, but also those interested in the theme, such as the artists Manoela Medeiros and Romain Dumesnil, who spent two weeks there last year invited by Dutra. Together, they have the Átomos, an autonomous art space, in Rio de Janeiro. The artists Marcia Ribeiro, Julie Beaufils, Daniela Fortes and Bia Monteiro have already passed through the residence at the invitation of Dutra, and in 2019 the artist Ivan Grilo is scheduled to arrive.

“I think it is important to move the spaces of production and reflection in art out of the big urban centers”, defends Dutra.

One of the works created by Medeiros in the residence is a rereading of Walking, emblematic work created by Lygia Clark, in 1964, in turn an appropriation of the tape of Moebius, where inside and outside constitutes like same space. While Clark’s work is on paper, Medeiros’s review is with Bananeira tree leaves.

While on the one hand the experience in Alto do Paraiso is dazzling because of the diversity of the region’s forests and waterfalls, it’s also challenging in the face of conflicts with agribusiness. He was probably responsible for the fire that occurred in October 2017, which destroyed 35,000 hectares of savannah vegetation in the Veadeiros National Park, soon after its expansion by about three times. It is speculated that the fire, started at the same time in many different places, would have been a counter-offensive of the farmers.

With this situation of polarization, which is the portrait of Brazil today, ALTO becomes an experience of immersion in an ecological sanctuary that, far from being mere tourism, is, after all, another way of experiencing the most central conflicts and dilemmas in the country.

Art needs identity

Por

Patricia Rousseaux

-

30 de abril de 2019

Retrato da série 'As Mulheres de Lá', de Fernanda Feher

Fernanda Feher em seu ateliê no espaço Pivô

The Pivô space, based in the illustrious Copan building in São Paulo downtown, increasingly reinforces its commitment to encourage research and experiments in art, welcoming artists, curators and researchers in programs they offer. One of them, the Research Pivot, is intended for residences offered during the year to Brazilians or emerging foreigners, molded according to what each one is seeking, lasting approximately three or four months each.

In the almost six years since its creation, 145 artists from 20 different countries have participated, promoting activities that allow important exchanges among the participants themselves, but also with external agents, be they art critics or the public itself. In addition, the program has a series of institutional partnerships that allow for valuable exchanges, such as the CPPC (Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros), the British Council, Matadero Madrid, Centro Cultural São Paulo and ArtRio.

In the first residence of 2018, 13 artists were participating. They are: Adrián S. Bará, Anna Costa e Silva, Carolina Cordeiro, Carolina Maróstica, deco adjiman, Fernanda Feher, Gilson Rodrigues, Leandra Espirito Santo, Maya Weishof, Renan Marcondes, Rui Dias Monteiro, Tomaz Klotzel and Vanessa da Silva.

ARTE!Brasileiros talked to Feher about the theme of the project that she develops at Pivô:

A:B When did you decide that you wanted to be an artist?

Fernanda Feher: I spent my adolescence drawing and painting, until my theater director told me: “You have to study painting”. That is how he left Brazil and studied for ten years at the PRATT Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, where I established my vocation.

But I’ve always been an idealist, an activist. I was involved in day-to-day social and political concerns. At that time, Fernanda had a painter and Fernanda was an activist. I did volunteer work. It was a division that bothered me.

Over time I created the project “The women of there”, where I was able to synthesize my true vocation, to bring stories into my work. I was relieved.

1 de 2

A!B: How did you create this project?

I started researching Africa and see where I could collaborate. I first went to Tanzania at a Canadian school that taught adult women to help them create independence for their husbands or how to strengthen themselves individually and become economically independent in order to work. I was there for a month and a half.

There are several organizations I came in contact with, one based in London, ORCHID, which impressed me a lot. They address the issue of female mutilation worldwide.

I presented my original idea: to travel, interview and paint these women and use the sale of labor to support the work of the organization.

So I went to Kenya and, unintentionally, to a region near Tanzania.

The work is very difficult, because awareness of genital mutilation comes up against the cultural issue. Despite this being banned by the government, traditional families wait for the school holidays to send the girls all at the same time to do the mutilation. For them, mutilation is part of the “woman’s growth.” Some women, not mutilated, can not marry or are bullied. Mutilation is part of “being a woman.”

It happens between the ages of 9 and 14, during which time the woman begins to menstruate. The custom is so ingrained that some families today do the mutilation at the moment the girl is born, as a way to circumvent the law, which now prohibits.

In other cases the midwife herself, when an unmanaged woman is going to give birth, maim the woman in childbirth. Imagine the fright!

Bringing light on this cultural myth imposes a very serious job. It can not ban and not support education because mutilation would not be necessary in development, but traumatic. It is extremely complex.

A!B: You did not tell us this story, yet we were captured by your work even without it being literal. By force, by color. How do you explain this?

My portraits are of women who discuss all this. Some are mutilated, others are girls who came from the schools where we were to listen or collaborate and teach.

I have an interest in telling their stories, their strength and joy, and not necessarily showing the place where they are victims. I want to try to bring the other side into my work. I like that, of them being able to see as a whole.

I think if I painted mutilated vaginas I would not be collaborating in anything with this process and maybe no one would come to ask me who these women are…

From New York to Paris

Por

Patricia Rousseaux

-

30 de abril de 2019

Santídio Pereira was born in Curral Comprido, in Piauí, but moved to São Paulo very early, at only 8 years of age. His interest in engraving was also quite precocious, as a boy, and he began to study artistic techniques at the Achaean Institute, with much encouragement from his mother. Standing out especially in woodcut, the young man was incorporated into the station’s artist team, where he already held two solo exhibitions in 2016 and in 2018.

Now 22, Santídio has drawn the attention of other artists, collectors and art professionals for his youth and mastery of technique, which for him is a mixture between painting, drawing and sculpture. He has already exhibited in SESC units in São Paulo, Tomie Ohtake Institute, Centro Cultural São Paulo and the Pinta Fair in Miami, among other spaces. Since the beginning of February and with the support of the Estação gallery, he started to realize an artistic residence offered by the AnnexB, entity that aims to promote Brazilian artists in New York.

Founded in 2016, the institution maintains a residency program exclusively for Brazilian artists, having received from its foundation names such as Dalton de Paulo, Carla Chaim, Nino Cais and Ivan Grilo. AnnexB was designed by Larissa Ferreira and has Tatiane Schilaro as creative director. Recently, it was announced that the space will be the place that will host the winner of the recently announced Prêmio Parque Lage.

During the month of residence, until the beginning of March, Santídio not only developed new works but also carried out activities around the city, as a workshop for children at the Lilian Weber School of the Arts in partnership with the Anne Fontaine Foundation. Throughout his stay, he met the paulistano Moisés Patrício, who was cover of our 43 issue with work of the series Aceita?, with whom he exchanged experiences and flourished a friendship.

1 de 4

Also in early March, Santídio inaugurated an exhibition with some of the works produced in the AnnexB, added to others he took from Brazil. The show, which runs until April 19, takes place in one of the b [x] venues, which hosts artists, creatives and technologists for activities. With curatorship of Schilaro, it was titled Between Two Skies and has six woodcuts produced in 2016 and 12 monotypes developed by the artist during his period in residence at AnnexB. For the curator, the show “invites us to imagine the collapse of the horizon, the multiplication of firmament and land when they become one.”

Later this year, he will hold his second international exhibition, this time crossing the ocean to Paris, where he will present works at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The institution “is dedicated to promoting and increasing public awareness of contemporary art. Every year, the Fondation Cartier organizes a program of exhibitions based on artists or individual themes and commissioning of artists, thus enriching an important collection”. There have already been several names of Brazilian artists, such as Beatriz Milhazes, Luiz Zerbini, Adriana Varejão and Véio. The exhibition at Cartier will be a collective, whose theme is the idea of the tree and will take place between July 9 and November 10 of this year.

Sensitive power

Por

Solange Farkas

-

30 de abril de 2019

exposição-pina — Rosana Paulino, a permanência das estruturas

In the middle of the artistic production that emerges from the regions of the world’s colonial past, the work of Rosana Paulino has become a reference before our eyes. In the curatorial research that seeks the voices and speeches of this geopolitical pole – and that feeds the actions of Videobrasil -, its force is imposed more and more. I remember the impression I had on the artist’s early works, which I saw, especially the series Bastidores/Backstage (1997), in which an angry and definitive seam takes on the space of decorum and modesty (white, feminine and bourgeois) blind black women. Or the monotypes Proteção extrema contra a dor e o sofrimento/Extreme protection against pain and suffering (2011), in which sewing lines fall from the eyes of a naked woman figure to make up something that looks like a fragile protective coverup, but also a tangle that limits and imprisons.

This last series was chosen by the artist and curator Daniel Lima to integrate the exhibition Agora somos todxs negrxs?, that composed the program at Galpão Videobrasil in 2017. The show also included Tecido Social/Social Fabric, ironic title engraving in which Paulino joins images with sloppy sutures and forced seams to challenge ideas of peaceful sociability and national unity. In order to challenge the perpetuation of the myth of Brazilian racial cordiality, even in the midst of art, Lima brought together a generation that proposes to deconstruct what he describes as the “triple trauma of colonization (extermination of native populations, slavery and religious persecution) of the micropolitical power of art”.

These past experiences with the artist’s work did not prepare me for the impact I felt when I went through the Rosana Paulino’s exhibition: a costura da memória (translated as ‘the sewing of the memory’). It was only in front of the body of work gathered by the São Paulo’s Pinacoteca that I realized the real dimension of the artist’s production. She impresses with the mastery with which she uses a variety of techniques and languages, such as watercolor, drawing, ceramics, video, embroidery, sculpture. But even more so, the poetic and political power of her narrative that plunges into history to bring forth a painful past and its very present inheritance, whether in the form of sensory impact or through instigating associations of ideas.

1 de 3

Looking back over more than two decades of the artist’s production, it is especially noteworthy to realise the delicacy with which she exposes extreme issues and situations, such as violence imposed on women, especially black women, the ill-concealed Brazilian racism, and the absence and social invisibility on black people, often reduced to the condition of object of study to the natural sciences by our historical iconography – a repertoire of which Rosana, not for nothing, is widely used. Some among many examples are the delicate and fluid trait with which she reconnects to the land the black female body, fragmented and uprooted by slavery, in Assentamentos/Settlements; and the lightness of the small ceramic sculptures assembled at the installation Tecelãs/Weavers (2009), which evokes with great poignancy the pain of the dual submission of being a woman and a black woman.

Rising to a mature production of rare power, the exhibition at Pinacoteca reveals Rosana Paulino as one of the most important artists in action in the Brazilian contemporary scene. This perception reinforces, but does not precede, the invitation we made to Paulino to present, at the 21st Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil, an unpublished work, which is being commissioned by the event. The Biennial stars in October in São Paulo and investigates, through an expressive set of works, poetics from the South that relate to the idea of new communities, created by principles distinct from those that founded the national states. As those that approach a familiar or tribal character, expressing their affections in domestic or memorialistic experiences. Starting from recurring issues in her work, related to memory and ancestry, Rosana Paulino dialogues with this universe and ventures into a new language. The exhibition presented at Pinacoteca will be at MAR – Rio Art Museum on April 13 and can be visited until the end of August.

A garden of codes

Por

Jamyle Rkain

-

30 de abril de 2019

46250165362_fedb2d8808_k — Detanico Lain, Mares da Lua (lunar maria), 2018

It is limiting to attribute to the pair Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain separately a formation when speaking in its artistic production. It is truer to say that both are linguists, graphic designers, typographers, and semiologists. And, of course, artists. After all, for more than 20 years together, since they migrated for the first time, from Rio Grande do Sul to São Paulo, everything that was learned was shared. So much so that it is admirable even to complete the other in a precise way when a word escapes reasoning, although words can hardly escape the duo that dominates it.

“A big part of our production is the creation of typographies, of writing systems, we are very interested in the codes, the alphabets from different places in the world”, says Angela. The show at Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro, in São Paulo, which extends until April 7, gives the dimension of this in the work of the duo.

Now married and with two children, Rafael and Angela live in Paris and are part of a select group of artists, watched closely by collectors and institutions from around the world. The art became their final dedication when, in 2002, they received a scholarship at the Palais de Tokyo. Already worked with graphic design, developing projects and visual identities.

Angela and Rafael commented that the idea to organize the show was part of a garden concept, but the Japanese, not the Parisians: “The ones from France are very organized for us”, she jokes and continues: “Although we are well organized in these works, but I think the garden experience corresponds more to the Japanese, a little wilder”. All works have some connection with light. After all, it is the light that indicates the passage of time, which pervades all works at some point. And it is the light that keeps a garden alive and strong.

The first works that the public finds when entering the exhibition in the ECPS do not yet give the exact tone of what will be found in the upstairs and the underground, besides the works in the outside of the building. Although everyone has a dialogue between them and start from codes, they do not invade and do not dictate a truism. Silence Waterfall (2018) was specially produced for the diagonal wall at the entrance of the site. Based on a photo of a waterfall that the pair visited in Kyoto, it is worked vertically on top of the pixel lines of the image, triggering the colors all over the wall, explains Angela: “It is a still image that is being shown little by little”. Rafael says that the sound that accompanies the work is the original Japanese waterfall.

Another work that represents an affectionate place for the artists and that is shown for the first time is From Luz to Paraíso (2018), that traces the route between the paulistanos districts, respecting the layout of the streets and the relief of the path. In the same environment, Ulysses (2017) is reproduced on a wall, a work in which a human figure defined by words walks, referring to the book of the same name by James Joyce. In the narrative, the main character walks through the city of Dublin for 18 hours, redefining its relationship with space (the city) and time. The text that builds the body on the wall is Joyce’s book, each step is an upset page.

This sense of the modification of space and time can be felt by those who visit the exhibition, which is always bringing the reflection on this temporality. And that is the intention of the pair, it can be said that they conclude this desire with success.

Also unpublished, the work Clouds of São Paulo (2018) hides a text by Oswald de Andrade, graphically transformed into cloud formats as they are blurred, moving through the huge screen on the mezzanine wall. Literature is very present in the life of Angela and Raphael, being a material of much research as well: “Our library is a very important part of our life”, recognizes Detanico. And language, whether by codes, pixels, words or images, pervades the whole exhibition. Everything is also linked to the origin of the couple, who began working together in the area of graphic design, especially with technology, in the late 90’s.

1 de 3

In the mezzanine, the artists explain the will to work using the architecture of the space in the construction of the landscape: on one side the clouds, opposite to the box. On the floor, the installation Salt Wave (2010), being a figure formed by the word “wave”, written in a code created by the duo: “A large part of our creation concerns the development of new typographies. We are very interested in the alphabets, the different forms of writing in the world”. The geometry of the letters in this alphabet creates different modulations for the wave.

In another wall, the public faces the 28 Moons (2014), a video installation where the figure is formed by the text (as in Ulysses). In the case, the figure of a moon is constructed by Galileo Galilei’s text the first time he observed the satellite, each of the twenty-eight minutes by which the video extends forms a state of the moon every 28 days of its variation during a cycle. Another experience with the moon awaits the audience in the basement: Lunar maria (2018) is a video installation that reflects on fabrics composed of garden stones the name of the seas present on the satellite, such as Sea of Tranquility and Sea of Islands. Light falls on positions of letters, like a drop, also in a code, forming the words and opening through the screens.

To bring a reflection on contemporary issues involving a geopolitical spectrum, Detanico Lain found it pertinent that the work White Noise (2006), which premiered during the Venice Biennale, was included in the exhibition. Closing the course of 14 works, several satellite images of a space of the Amazon Forest are placed in layers, this gradually gains intrusions of a white, being erased continuously, referring to the problems of deforestation and climatic issues: “If in 2006 this was important…”, Angela starts. “Now that’s urgent”, Rafael completes.

Connections at MAM’s collection

Por

Maria Hirszman

-

30 de abril de 2019

acervo-mam — Keila Alaver, Sem título, 2000

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.

Portrait of Paul Klee when in balance

Por

admin

-

30 de abril de 2019

Tentacular, Paul Klee exhibition at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) of São Paulo, presents a diversified portrait of the artist, allowing the expression of all his geniality. Of course, his role in modern art and his personal style – in dialogue with several of the hegemonic currents of the first half of the 20th century – are the basis of the exhibition, which features over 120 works. However, the highest quality of Equilibrio Instável (Unstable Equilibrium) lies in the strategy of show not a single and coherent trajectory of the painter, but rather illuminate different aspects of his life and his work, composing a panorama – evidently not exhaustive – of the multiple issues that Klee and his time holds dear.

So, what could be a traditional retrospective that countersigns the official narrative about the trajectory of an artist deeply coherent and prolific, spreads by research, themes, techniques and different times. This approach by chapters, which respect a tenuous chronology, also answers to the difficult architecture of the space, fragmented into multiple rooms disconnected from one another. With this, the visitor follows the artist since childhood, on a set of simple drawings, representing, for example, family Christmas scenes. The presence of such pieces in the exhibition can be explained by both the importance of the Zentrum Paul Klee (a Swiss institution organizing the show and depository of his work) for the preservation of his story, and the curious fact of the painter himself have included these work, that at his discretion would already presents “productive autonomy”, in comprehensive record that kept the entire life of his production.

Paul Klee, Woman in Traditional Costume [Mulher com roupa típica], 1940, Cola colorida sobre papel sobre cartão.

The visitor will little by little accompanying his walk, and witnesses through selected works his desire to improve himself in the academic study of the human body (which had already cost him a spot at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 1898) and the subsequent liberation of an art that only reproduce the visible; the interesting studies that performs in the first decade of the 20th century, receiving the title of “Inventions”, in which creates strange figures, early surreal, with some irony and acidity; the importance of travel such as those made for Italy (1901), France (1912) and particularly to Tunisia (1914); the presence of the family (in the pictures and the puppets made for his son); the discovery of color; and the intense relationship with other forms of artistic expression such as music and theater.

The movements are complementary, combining importante biographical facts with its main veins of research and study, such as the works of more expressionist bias, developed in the years 1910 (when participated in the Der Blaue Reiter group, with artists such as Kandinsky and Macke) or the persistent drawings of geometric models that performs in several years that he was a professor at the Bauhaus, period in which devotes itself to understand and synthesize the formal relations of plastic representation. Sometimes the visitor is placed in contact with works that mark his relationship with the world around, and in other faces the result of a constant effort to dominate and create a new art. Disciplined to the extreme, Klee was by standard does not pass a day without trace a line.

Despite the importance normally attributed to the artist’s contribution to the development of abstraction in modern art, few were the opportunities of the brazilian public to get a closer look at his production, as shows Roberta Saraiva Coutinho in a study published in the catalog of Unstable Balance .Such absence is even more strange if we take into account the major influence – formal or theoretical — of their research in local modernism, at a distance dialog that Zentrum Paul Klee aims to map better and present in the future to the swiss public.

The exhibition mostly account with drawings (80% of his production is composed of works on paper), among which we can highlight a striking image group, outlined quickly in the heat, in which he comments with acidity the tragic events leading up to World War II. These almost caricatures, in chalk on cardboard, show scenes as the repulsive figure of the dictator or the horrors experienced by immigrants, by persecuted by Hitler’s regime and that are part of a set of about 250 illustrations. Klee himself was victim of Nazism. In addition to have his works included in the exhibition of “degenerate art” organized by the Reich in 1937, he was appointed as a Jew, had his house searched, lost his job and was forced to take refuge in Switzerland, his country of birth, in 1933

Paul Klee, Hanging Down [Pendurado para baixo], 1939, Cola colorida e lápis sobre papel, doação de Livia Klee

Another group of works that deserves attention is the set of drawings of angels, at the same time humans and supernaturals, fallen and beautiful. There is for example Angel Forgotten (1939), whose delicacy and modesty – with the hands and wings together – is touching. Is also present in the selection, which after São Paulo follows for units of the institution in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, the most celebrated angel of Klee, Angelus Novus, (1920), entering history as the emblematic image of the theses on the concept of history of Walter Benjamin. Purchased by Benjamin in 1921, the work belongs to the Israel Museum and rarely travels, but the Zentrum Paul Klee made for the exhibition a faithful and certified copy that, according to the German philosopher, works as an allegory of the story, which see with horror the destruction of the past while being propelled into the future by this storm that “we call progress”.

The “confluence of the connection between a worldview and the pure plastic exercise”, as defined by the artist himself, meets its synthetic expression in works such as Crossed Off the List. The screen, painted in 1933 brings the image of a man, quite possibly a self-portrait, a man profiled, sad face, with a cross over his head and the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Klee always attempted to unite creative relations, content and form, with existential issues, ideological, ethical,” synthesises Fabienne Eggelhöfer, curator, reiterating the idea of balance expressed in the title.

The affective rigor of Farnese, in its entirety

Por

Maria Hirszman

-

30 de abril de 2019

here is no fixed point from which to look at the work of Farnese de Andrade. His work, now reviewed on display at Almeida and Dale Gallery, not only contains a unique plastic and symbolic power, but also makes the history of Brazilian art more complex and interesting. Serving as a counterpoint to the official narrative, which sweeps under the rug any expression that escapes the idea of an abstract vocation in mid-twentieth-century Brazil, Farnese’s art deals with interdicts, phantoms, and archetypes, and brings out an uncomfortable subjectivity. As Denise Mattar, who is responsible for the selection of the almost 100 pieces in the show, his works “frolic in the bowels of the unconscious, and so fascinate, enchant, frighten and disturb.”

Dense, the exhibition spans a wide range of research and moments of the artist’s production. It seeks to illuminate the importance of its graphic production, little seen in the last decades but fundamental in its trajectory. For most of his career, Farnese was more valued as an illustrator and engraver, and it was not until the 1990s, and especially in the 21st century, that his three-dimensional production acquired an undeniable prominence, overshadowing other forms of expression. And yet, such a valuation was not enough to get him out of the way. It is curious that, despite being considered one of the most fertile Brazilian artists and has been revisited in several exhibitions, studies and publications (with emphasis on the encouraged book edited by Cosac Naify in 2002), it has been kept in the shade when it comes to recount the history of Brazilian art, being unjustly absent from important historical reviews, such as the 24th São Paulo Biennial, for example.

Farnese de Andrade, 5 Pensamentos, 1978–82

Such forgetfulness is often explained by the fact that his work presents a certain mismatch in relation to what was done hegemonically in his period of performance. He faced what Denise Mattar defines as “dictatorship of abstraction” and a vigorous resistance to forms of expression more linked to a figuration close to Expressionism and Surrealism. What supposedly brings him closer to authors who preceded him, like his master Guignard (whose indications secured him employment as an illustrator in several publications when he moved to Rio in 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 by succeeding generations than of his contemporaries.

Instead of considering the two-dimensional and three-dimensional productions of the artist as watertight blocks, Mattar’s curators try to smash the boundaries between languages, illuminating and putting into dialogue some of the most striking moments of this trajectory. “One thing is contained within the other. 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, to moments marked in their trajectory. He always has before him an artist who seems to be constantly testing himself and his plastic, symbolic, metaphorical possibilities.

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 he did to “call sleep” and were called “Obsessive”; a well-behaved copy of the erotic phase he developed in the late 1960s; and one of three drawings, called “Censorship”, in which he makes an acid and ironic comment about the period of repression and gives an answer to the confiscation and destruction by the military of the works that he had sent to the 2 nd Biennial of Bahia two years earlier. These pieces guaranteed Farnese the Travel Prize at the Modern Art Hall of 1970, taking it to Europe, where it remained for the next five years.

Two other important sets of two-dimensional works were panned by the show. The first of these is composed of 24 paintings made between 1963 and 1980. In addition to demonstrating his versatility – “he did everything at the same time”, Denise says -, this huge panel highlights some of the artist’s interests as a fascination with the sensuality of the human body (not just homoerotic) and their ability to reinvent ways of making art. In these cases, for example, he develops a particular technique, which he calls “transformed paint” and which consists of the application of watercolor mixed with a secret chemical on the wrong side of the already painted canvas, transferring to the work color spots and seductive forms , on which it had only partial control. The second is a set of monotypes made from objects found on the seashore or in landfills in the early 1960s and soon to be incorporated into their three-dimensional collages.

Started in 1964 and produced ceaselessly until his death in 1996, these pieces that gather wormwood; doll carcasses; saints of popular devotion; objects collected in antique shops, garbage or on the streets; shells found at random or images inherited from an uncle photographer form the body of the exhibition. They are embalmed in a resinous environment, enclosed in oratories that they adopt at the time they live in Barcelona, protected by glass beads or sheltered in the hollows of the traditional wooden troughs used in the popular cuisine of their native Minas Gerais, these compositions at the same time agonizing and seductive times – of an impressive formal preciosity – seem, as Mattar says, to “paralyze time”.

1 de 3

The themes are recurrent. There are annunciations, dives in affective memories related to paternal and maternal figures, a long series of works titled “We come from the sea”, and other fields of research to which it returns in an obsessive and compulsive way, as in an effort of purging and organization internal. There is something lugubrious, nostalgic, in this return to the past, that reopen wounds, leave feelings on display. As Charles Cosac well defined in the opening text of the catalog, “he fed himself nostalgia”.

And it infects us in this process. His pieces put to the flower of his skin emotions that should be buried, especially in a country that bet on the univocal way, redemptive of an art of right angles and abstract symbols, leaving behind their feet of clay, their wood gnawed by termites, a strange sensuality and his beheaded saints. In telling his stories, marked by terrible collective memories like the drowning of his two brothers some years before his birth and by a depressive state marked by several crises, Farnese echoes in each of them in a subjective way. However, it inevitably stirs intensely with feelings that go far beyond reason.

Stephen Dean, the color as a connection of the look

Por

Leonor Amarante

-

30 de abril de 2019

A

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”.

Janela [Window], 2019. vidro dicróico e borracha

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.

The Alphabet of an Alchemist

Por

Jamyle Rkain

-

30 de abril de 2019

“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”.