Studio Visits

Wednesday, 19. June 2013

Alex Cerveny: do irreal ao extraordinário

Alex Cerveny tem uma vista ampla - de um andar além do vigésimo – do centro de São Paulo. E é mesmo do alto que chegamos mais próximo do olhar divino. Nascido na Pauliceia desvairada, ex-contorcionista e viajante diletante, o artista tem muita estória para contar. Com uma bagagem imaginativa de muitos séculos, daqueles em que viveram os clássicos arcaicos, bárbaros românticos, objetivantes medievais e os reativos maníaco-depressivos, nos quais fábulas eram metáforas de gente e a gente era novo demais para saber, não é difícil envolver-se nas narrativas extraordinárias dos seus desenhos e telas. Tarefa espinhosa é eleger dentre eles o que melhor representa a obra do artista, já que os temas parecem ter um quê de unidade e, contudo, espalham filosofias distintas.

Mas isso não importa. Importante é sentar e escutar o que Alex tem a dizer sobre a relação do corpo e da mente, ficar em dúvida sobre a metafísica das coisas, que ele mesmo nem afirma acreditar, mas também não nega. E para desvendar essa dicotomia orgânica misteriosa, o artista emprega o desenho, técnica que, segundo ele, possibilita acompanhar com velocidade e fluidez a captação dessa relação física-intelectual. Muito embora a pequena escala seja uma constante na sua produção - sobretudo nas pinturas-, a silhueta retratada parece ter sido desenhada no tamanho do artista, e os vazios que o contorno não preenche assemelham-se à uma transparência, digamos, da alma. Como se fosse possível ver por dentro o que o corpo esconde de quem vê de fora.

Artista em seu ateliê

Entre homens que são meio martelo ou têm pernas elásticas [alusão aos tempos de picadeiro de Alex], existe um cenário comum e reincidente, uma natureza representacional dos quatro elementos: terra, ar, água e fogo. Às vezes, este último é protagonista, aparecendo como uma chama sólida de vermelho ou em formato de fumaça-nuvem. Não raro há referências míticas ou religiosas, de Sísifos existencialistas a liturgias purificadoras; os contos infantis também estão presentes, especialmente aqueles cuja moral da história resvala na violência, como em Der Struwwelpeter [1845] e Pinóquio [1883].

La Adoración del Cubo Blanco, 2007 | óleo sobre linho | 24 x 30 cm

Em La Adoración del Cubo Blanco [2007], a pintura, como o próprio título antecipa, parece descrever o culto ao símbolo da fruição ascética contemporânea. Mas alto lá! Abaixo aos conceitualismos, à promessa moderna, ao abstrato e neutro, à arte autorreferente. Assumidamente, o artista não vê graça nessa vertente, ao invés de cubo branco, ele preferiria construir pirâmides enigmáticas ou muros babilônicos. Mas talvez seja na atmosfera de pinceladas Metafísicas – nada mais “de chiriano” que um objeto emanando luz -, que esteja a congruência intelectual do que ele busca, no sentido de que a arte não precisa de vínculos práticos e prescinde da História [a oficial], pois se reinventa enquanto narrativa, à moda de qualquer época; Alex gosta dela assim, meio “esquizo” - frenética, ela ilustrativa [por que não?], dando pitacos ou duras opiniões figurativas sobre a vida no mundo.

La Destrucción Del Cubo Blanco, 2008 | óleo sobre algodão | 11 x 16 cm

No mapeamento do universo cerveniano, não se poderia deixar de lado o texto, tanto como referência quanto parte integrante nas obras. Em muitos trabalhos a presença da mensagem textual faz-se elemento novo e interdependente da imagem. Às vezes a citação é inédita. Às vezes foi apropriada da literatura, poesia, tevê, canções ou revistas. Logo no início da nossa conversa, ele rememorou o Hino à Bandeira, de Olavo Bilac:

Contemplando o teu vulto sagrado,
Compreendemos o nosso dever,
E o Brasil por seus filhos amados,
poderoso e feliz há de ser!

O ensejo de uma próxima leva de trabalhos vem dessa temática exacerbadamente [pelo bem e pelo mal] nacionalista. Embora Alex dedique tanta energia mundo afora – bandeiras cervenianas estão fincadas de Jerusalém a Nazca -, não se esquece do que existe em território nacional. A tríade “Miranda-Matogrosso-e-Maravilha¹”, fora de ordem hierárquica, representa o especial apreço de Cerveny por uma cultura brasileira, por assim dizer, posterior a supostos canibalismos e vertentes primitivas. Guaraci, Jaci: “Tupi or not tupi that is the question”². Mas a crise de identidade brasileira não é uma novidade. O Modernismo foi a adolescência tupiniquim, que depois de deixar o berço esplêndido, quis retornar aos seus totens e depor certos tabus, buscar nas origens uterinas a liberdade primitiva. Figuras indígenas figuram com mandacarus num céu diurno de azul profundo. Como serão as próximas explorações dos tipos pertencente ao mundo des[colonizado] de “mestiços mulatos cafuzos pardos mamelucos sararás crilouros guaranisseis e judárabes”³?

Cerveny é assim, transforma uma nota marginal em história principal, meio inventada, meio real. Verificar a procedência pouco importa, pois no final, os personagens existem de verdade e a base para o nascimento de cada um deles é sempre legítima.

1. O artista refere-se às figuras de Carmen Miranda, Ney Matogrosso e Elke Maravilha.
2. ANDRADE, Oswald. Manifesto Antropófago, 1928.
3. Trecho da canção “Inclassificáveis”, de Arnaldo Antunes.

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Paula Nishijima

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Tuesday, 28. May 2013

Lucas Simões: sobre paisagens imemoriais

Sob o peso cinza de cimento, repousam folhas brancas de papel; são lâminas frágeis, que empilhadas constroem uma paisagem tridimensional, uma espécie de topografia imaginária. Vales subtraídos dessa matéria deixam se parecer com areia, que com o vento se desmancha e remonta uma memória arquivada. A série provável horizonte lança com o próprio título um enigma ao espectador, que confrontado com a pequena escala de uma possível larga realidade, reage imaginativamente, acessando em si as referências que possam encaixar naquele cenário.

"provável horizonte I"

Inicialmente, o aparente tamanho reduzido das coisas configura uma maquete arquitetônica de várias dessas “topografias imaginárias”. No entanto, quando atentamos aos elementos que sobrepõem esses lugares, identificamos suas formas: saquinhos de ar, pedaços de plástico bolha, fragmentos de isopor – tudo isso convertido em sólido concreto, rompendo a memória tátil desses objetos. Não é preciso sequer tocá-los. Aos olhos eles já são suficientemente pesados.

"provável horizonte III"

O peso, o tempo é a atual exposição individual de Lucas Simões, em cartaz na galeria Emma Thomas, em São Paulo. O artista contrapõe duas instâncias de definições um tanto subjetivas e a missão de tentar defini-las é um campo de limites tênues. “O peso” pode ser material, findável e imutável em si. Já “o tempo” é imaterial, infinito e, por definição, implica sucessão de estados. Na sua contagem universal, sucedem, irreversivelmente, uma linha de acontecimentos, enquanto que o peso sugere-se fixo, acionado uma única vez, elemento estabilizante ou sufocador, que está necessariamente sobre, a fim de afirmar-se como tal. As pequenas réplicas, apoiadas sobre as pilhas de papel, obedecem à sua escala original, mas enganam quanto ao verdadeiro peso, pois convertem a leveza do ar em consistente cimento. De modo que o artista iguala uma miniatura de paisagem a um objeto descartável, e esta equação confunde e recria novas memórias sobre o passado que incorre no contato com os prováveis horizontes.

À parte o conceito objetivo de tempo – aquele que se conta e se apreende pela racionalidade -, existe através da existência humana o tempo subjetivo, que escorre indivisível, numa sucessão de estados da consciência – esta, portanto, a memória -, liga o passado ao futuro, num movimento de ir e vir, já não irreversível ou irretardável, pois, nesse caso, não é possível existir presente sem adição memorial do passado ou projeção do futuro.

[...] não há estado de alma, por mais simples que seja, que não mude a cada instante, pois não há consciência sem memória, não há continuação de um estado sem adição, ao sentimento presente, da lembrança de momentos passados. Nisto consiste a duração. A duração interior é a vida contínua de uma memória que prolonga o passado no presente, seja porque o presente encerra distintamente a imagem incessantemente crescente do passado, seja, mais ainda porque testemunha a carga sempre mais pesada que arrastamos atrás de nós, à medida que envelhecemos. Sem esta sobrevivência do passado no presente, não haveria duração, mas somente instantaneidade.*

O francês Henri Bergson [1859-1941] batizou de “duração” a temporalidade memorial humana, na qual o tempo configura uma teia que interliga pretérito, presente e futuro; aquilo a que ele se refere como “instantaneidade” compila o tempo apreendido racionalmente, de formatação rígida e espacializada dentro da sua infinitude. Lucas permeia essas duas ideias, propondo com a série de fotografias - o peso, o tempo - o questionamento sobre a nitidez que uma lembrança pode ter sobre a realidade. A fotografia, diferente da pintura ou da escultura, goza de mérito por captar, mais agudamente, um instante. Contudo, ao entrar em contato ela, nossa memória mais reconstrói do que efetiva dados que realmente aconteceram. O efeito que a parafina causa nas fotos estetiza a relação memorial com o tempo, na medida em que distorce e cria uma camada de opacidade nessa imagem.

"o peso, o tempo"

A tentativa de representar um tema reconfigurado pela subjetividade também aparece na série desretratos. O artista convida alguns amigos para lhe contar um segredo. Enquanto essa revelação é feita, Lucas fotografa-os, sem ouvi-los. Para ele, não interessa o desvendar de um mistério, mas a captação das expressões que irrompem na libertação de um pedaço íntimo de cada um. O segredo ainda pode ter uma cor escolhida, obviamente, pelo respectivo dono. O resultado final é a sobreposição aleatória das imagens, recortadas pelo artista em formatos diversos, ocultando e revelando diferentes partes de cada rosto. Como se o retrato de um homem pudesse compreender aquilo que ele esconde do resto do mundo.

da série "desretratos"

da série "desretratos"

Ao entrar no ateliê de Lucas, uma escala de cores vibrantes em uma das paredes é avistada. Não se tarda a perceber que são de livros, organizados por cor, fileira sobre fileira, recobrindo de ponta a ponta o fundo de um dos lados da sala. Livros de arte, arquitetura e um ou outro referente a outro tema. Conecto essa imagem com dois outros trabalhos que ele me mostrou. Um deles faz parte da série verdade é uma colagem contínua – “frames” de uma mesma paisagem panorâmica, cujo tema aborda símbolos que representam socialmente um ideal político. O artista iguala o tamanho de construções arquitetônicas que transmitem mensagens diferentes – tal como uma imagem de comemoração na ex Iugoslávia e uma feira de arquitetura no Japão -, questionando o que, de fato, elas representam diante da sua respectiva proposta ideológica.

Ateliê do artista

da série "verdade é uma colagem contínua"

Lucas é o tipo de artista que experimenta materiais. Essa é uma das razões pelas quais a maioria de seus trabalhos tem um tamanho de manuseio, ou seja, são peças que podem ser produzidas em duas mãos. Parafina, resina, cimento, tudo muda de estado – do pó ao líquido, do líquido ao sólido. E nessa mesma lógica o artista foi da escrita à arte, de forma tautológica, como se uma fosse a definição da outra. Escultura é o título literal e literário de um de seus trabalhos. Explico: ele apropria-se de um livro, cujo nome é não só o conteúdo do que se trata, mas o objeto que se torna, a escultura – esta representada por um exemplar clássico e reconhecível na capa.

"Escultura"

Questionado sobre a relevância que a narrativa ou ideia tem em cada um de seus trabalhos, Lucas responde que o conjunto da obra comunica, ou seja, a pesquisa de materiais e o resultado formal estão aliados à poética e a razão daquilo ser. Com efeito, o processo pelo qual ele passa para chegar a um resultado é um caminho contínuo e não linear, que sofre a influência do tempo e segue como a nossa memória, reconstruindo paisagens imemoriais.

*BERGSON, Henri. Introdução à metafísica.

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Paula Nishijima

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Wednesday, 8. May 2013

Among the threads of f.marquespenteado

Entering f.marquespenteado’s room at the 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012) was just like entering a cosy home. Wallpapers connecting all the works, curtains in the centre of the space, vases with plants, shelves with bibelots, a clothes’ rack and a dining table set revealed the personal and intimate art of f.marquespenteado. The colourful domesticity of his pieces filled with details to be discovered per square centimeter tells us a personal story that also talks about global matters, such as sexuality and the way people relate to each other.

f.marquespenteado's room at the 30th Bienal de Sao Paulo (2012). Photo: Leo Eloy

When visiting the artist’s studio (which is in his home) I soon notice that there’s no room for regular furniture at the flat. The domesticity of his pieces have nothing to do with having a traditional home. There’s no sofa, no armchairs, no coffee-table nor tv. All the rooms at his place are working stations, having their walls filled with his own art. “I always say my bed is here just by chance. I want to have a regular home, but it has been very useful having a table with a piece of work in progress waiting for me in every room I enter”, says the artist.

f.marquespenteado at his flat/studio

This visit to his studio came in a very special moment, when the artist is experiencing a great change: “I have been thinking that having a studio/home is a disadvantage. I’m in contact with my work all the time and I think I need to give it some space - to give it time to breathe and to have the opportunity of being away from it so that I can re-encounter the piece after a while”. This is probably one of the last studio visits the old apartment with very large windows and wooden floors where f.marquespenteado has been living for the past 20 years will take. His plan is to move out of Brazil soon, getting rid of most of his things for this new stage of his life.

And it was away from Brazil in the late 90s, when living in the UK, that f.marquespentado discovered himself as an artist. Before that he was Fernando, a professional from the Applied Arts who worked with techniques of fabric beautification - usually free painting over fabric. It was in London, where he worked as a costume designer, that he decided to do a Masters in Textiles at Central Saint Martins. He started experimenting with his drawings and soon realised that his work didn’t fit anymore in the fashion industry strict rules of colour palettes and seasonal collections. That was when he dropped the school and started another Masters degree at Goldsmiths where he studied at the extinct Visual Arts / Textiles course.

f.marquespenteado is his signature, which gives us a hint of what his matters of interest are: gender is no longer attached to his name. The artist, who works with embroidery, a technique historically attributed to women, explores the notions of gender and the role of masculinity in the society.

The way men relate to each other is central to his work. His first investigations focused on the public image of homossexual relations: “I’ve seen many gay men of my generation having trouble to open themselves up to society due to professional pressure. I’ve always been very confortable to bring on this discussion because my professional path never caused any pressure for me to stay in the closet, but at the same time there’s always the issue of how to present yourself publicly, how to deal with being a gay couple, how to show that to the world with words and gestures - do these words and gestures show we are embarrassed to talk about this? Do we become inhibited when talking about this? So I started to work with homo-erotic images, making drawings over paper that later were covered with embroidery”.

Series "Black man, white man" - drawing and embroidery

The drawing is another important feature of f.marquespenteado’s work. What he calls an childish drawing trace is the basis of his embroidery narratives. This interest in telling a story through the thread came from an improbable place: a prison. His artwork with embroidering started when the artist, while studying at Goldsmiths, volunteered with inmates joining a project where they learnt the craft. “When I joined the workshops at the prison I found prisoners working to sell their work. It was something very mechanical. So I suggested they should have their work emancipated using their own personal experiences: I asked them to express aspects and stories of their own lives in the embroidery. They were soon able to notice and recognise the visuality as an important aspect of their personal trace, which was composed with their life experiences”.

“Who would say this was made by a murderer? Breaking the law or committing a crime will really prevent someone of their humanity?”

The discussion on masculinity and gender has gained power with this technique and his experience working with the inmates. “I started to pay attention in the many masculinities present at the carceral system and to create work related to punishment between men. The key of my concern is actually the brutality culture between men: men are target of other men, we are all raised to repress a tender sensibility towards other men, which in my vision is the origin of a meaningless and unrestricted killing. On the other hand, at the prison, I was also interested in the position of guys who did not fear being a couple in public, men who could face a loving relation even with this strong pressure”.

After finished, this project was exhibited at a show curated by Janis Jefferies: `Boys who Sew` at the Crafts Council Gallery, in London, and f.marquespenteado went back to Brazil, where he developed his work with embroidery relating this delicate technique with rough material such as plastic or neoprene. A work where domestic and familiar objects become the stage for personal narratives told through his unique infantile trace of drawing. f.marquespenteado’s pieces present tenderness and brutality.

The series New Realism for example, only exhibited once, show delicate souvenirs - like notebooks or colorful decorative-plates - with real and unspeakably brutal pictures of men who were decapitated in Brazilian prisons and whose bodies were returned to their families in pieces.

The works, that show explicit violence between men, are extremely hard to look at, highlighting how cynical society gets regarding a hard subject like this: “how violent can we all become when we are exposed to deeply violent situations? There is a Portuguese idiom that says `when the need knocks on your door, the virtue leaves through the window` - and this would happen to all of us. I wanted to show how cynical we are about this matter. The cynicism among civilians takes place in order to blame someone pretending this has nothing to do with us so we can lay our heads over our pillows and have a calm sleep during the night”, says f.marquespenteado. The colourful and beautiful souvenirs are so familiar to us, however they also work as a reminder of how disconnected our lives are from what the images pictured on these objects show - an unbearably hard reality.

New Realism

The process of making and the time spent on them are also strong features of f.marquespenteado works. The visible stitches and threads are physical evidences of time, of the time the artist devoted to the process of creating a piece. It is also evident in his work his awareness when dealing with colours, inherited from his watercolour studies during the 1990’s. The result is a work which is complete: it balances conceptual questions of gender, masculinity, violence and sexuality, the creative process, textiles and colour.

“I really enjoy my time working with colours and embroidery, I sometimes have this wish of turning back to the applied arts, that are tender, soft and feel good. But I think it is important for an artist to understand how they want to be recognised. And I honestly don’t want to be known as someone with a tender trace that is repeated ad infinitum”.

Up to now f.marquespenteado has nothing to worry about - in his work the tenderness of his kind personality is merged with deep and uncomfortable issues that sometimes are subtly and sometimes in a rather direct and shocking way. This is an artist in constant transformation. Therefore we can understand why after almost ten years in Sao Paulo he feels the need of leaving his studio/home in search for new challenges. All we need to do now is to wait and see the reflections of all these changes to his work.

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Júlia Frate Bolliger

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Thursday, 2. May 2013

Jorge Menna Barreto: das palavras esculpidas à potência do silêncio

Se diz a palo seco
o cante sem guitarra;
o cante sem; o cante;
o cante sem mais nada;
se diz a palo seco
a esse cante despido:
ao cante que se canta
sob o silêncio a pino.

João Cabral de Melo Neto, trecho do poema A palo seco

A Escrita. Para que ela aconteça, é necessário silêncio. Para que ela aconteça, é necessário tempo. A Escrita apareceu desse jeito, substantivada e subjetivada, como resultado de um processo e, mais que isso, um lugar de busca constante no trabalho de Jorge.

Jorge Menna Barreto completou o doutorado há pouco. Não por acaso o interesse pela pesquisa acadêmica, já que a sua obra lida justamente com o canal fundamental da comunicação: a linguagem. Ele dá continuidade ao trabalho de concretistas, como os irmãos Augusto e Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari e, posteriormente, Julio Plaza.

Estúdio do artista

Esse ano o artista foi contemplado no programa Residências Artísticas, da FUNDAJ [Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife/PE], no qual realizou o projeto “Atos de Desistências”, que abarcou um workshop de três dias: primeiro, apresentação de material sobre João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carla Zaccagnini, Jac Leirner, Andreas Slominski e Alberto Giacometti. Este último ilustra o mote da investigação proposta: a renúncia. No processo escultórico de Giacometti, a forma humana é subvertida ao seu mínimo estrutural e reconhecível. De modo que a subtração pode ser entendida como construção do vazio, que, por sua vez, gera uma área aberta a novos sentidos. Portanto, o esculpir de um elemento, quando levado ao máximo, cria nos espaços de ausência uma área de potencialidade, que muito embora seja resultado da abdicação de um quadro estável e preenchido, fornece acesso a um plano ativo com novas possibilidades. Dentro dessa proposta, os participantes foram convidados a fazer um dia de jejum alimentar, como efetuação física desse conceito de esvaziamento e, por fim, os resultados dos “espaços” gerados foram analisados e discutidos entre eles, no último dia da oficina. O público, mais que espectador, é um lado importante nos trabalhos de Jorge. Muitos deles são pensados com a participação das pessoas e para elas. Algumas propostas são direcionadas a uma seleção de interessados específicos, enquanto que, outras vezes, a interação acontece indiretamente, por meio de alguma intervenção no espaço comum de convivência.

A série dos “tapetes” - palavras criadas - apareceu pela primeira vez no Panorama da Arte Brasileira [2011], MAM-SP, depois na Baró galeria/SP [2012], e esse ano, como exposição do projeto Residências Artísticas, foi espalhada pelo edifício da FUNDAJ Derby, onde tomou parte no cotidiano de quem frequenta o prédio. “Deusejo”, “prazar”, “resistual”, “amorte”, “inverção” - todas elas e outras mais estão alocadas na fronteira entre dois lugares distintos. Mas por que tapetes? Para além da usual função de capacho ou simplesmente decorativa, eles são dispositivos mediadores entre dois territórios e, de certa forma, preparam o transeunte para fazer a passagem entre um e outro – não raro somos recebidos com um “seja bem-vindo” sob nossos pés. Da mesma forma, as palavras criadas partem de duas matrizes diferentes e é no limite entre si que elas encontram coalizão e ressignificação. Alguns dos frequentadores do espaço aprovaram a intervenção, outros contrariaram-se com ela. O fato é que algumas palavras, ironicamente, não antecipavam com acolhimento direto a transição do passante entre, por exemplo, o corredor e o elevador, mas com a ambiguidade de “amorte”. Interessante pensar em que momento a função pragmática do tapete deu voz ao que nele estava inscrito e se esta mensagem seria razão de vacilo na passagem de uma área a outra.

"Tapete" em exibição na mostra do programa "Residências Artísticas", FUNDAJ/Recife, 2013

No Panorama da Arte Brasileira (2011), os “tapetes” foram pensados para o setor educativo do Museu de Arte Moderna/SP. Jorge pesquisou todas as obras da mostra e elegeu 25 trabalhos para, a partir desse repertório, dar origem às palavras. O público participante das ações educativas foi convidado a redescobrir de quais obras os novos vocabulários teriam surgido. A resposta, entretanto, não encontrou o certo ou o errado, mas ao contrário, pois o caráter multiplicador de significados possibilitou que essa identificação fosse uma experiência diferente daquela que prega o esclarecimento. Nesse caso, o tapete cumpriu o papel de mediador entre espectador e trabalho artístico, não como um guia que leva o acompanhante a um lugar comum, mas como aquele que mostra percursos diferentes.

Da série "Tapetes", 2013 | borracha vulcanizada

Por fim, Jorge mostrou um filme, também realizado durante o programa Residências Artísticas, na FUNDAJ. O cinema tem como uma de suas definições e qualidades a imagem em movimento. No entanto, é a ausência dela na tela que esse vídeo questiona. “- E a ausência de imagem lhe incomoda?”. Nesta pergunta, o interlocutor passa a ser o próprio telespectador – sentado na sua poltrona, esperando por uma narrativa ilustrativa. As palavras da legenda vão se desconfigurando, à medida em que a questão se repete; viram poema, depois letras, depois imagem.

cartaz a ser distribuído na exibição do vídeo realizado durante o programa "Residências Artísticas", FUNDAJ/Recife, 2013

O texto, o discurso e a tradução [não presa ao sentido da transcrição de um idioma para outro] estão sempre presentes no processo criativo do artista. Na ausência da imagem, a escrita se faz visual. Jorge diz colecionar palavras antes mesmo de pensar em como elas serão colocadas aos olhos, ou seja, em como elas serão formalizadas, coloridas ou não. E não é através do caminho explicativo por onde se encaminha a sua obra, mas à revelia dele, na construção que borra e funde elementos, tornando passível a existência do híbrido.

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Paula Nishijima

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Defined tags for this entry: arte, fundaj, joão cabral de melo neto, jorge menna barreto, palavra, residências artísticas, tapete

Tuesday, 9. April 2013

Ana Prata e a teia morfológica das coisas

Ao pesquisar sobre Ana Prata, cujo nome já me era claro como parte da conhecida “geração de jovens pintores”, encontrei alguns textos sobre a sua última exposição individual, no Instituto Tomie Ohtake [2012]. A caracterização mais recorrente sobre o seu trabalho é o fato da artista utilizar-se de fotografias, sobretudo da internet, para pintar. Como se esse recurso “randômico” fosse, digamos, uma conexão prática entre ela e a pintura dos dias atuais.

Ana nasceu em Sete Lagoas, uma pequena cidade de Minas Gerais, e veio para São Paulo cursar Ciências Sociais na USP. Dois anos depois, insatisfeita com a opção, decidiu migrar para as Artes Plásticas, na qual se formou em 2008. O seu interesse por pintura não veio, como ela mesma disse, de uma vocação infantil, praticada desde criança, mas da própria genealogia da arte contida nessa expressão. Qual artista não olhou ou não olha para os pintores?

Ateliê da artista

Indagada sobre a suposta resistência atual à pintura, enquanto linguagem afogada pela quinta dimensão de manifestações tecnológicas, instalações e afins, a artista logo se opôs a qualquer tipo de discurso do gênero. E não é novidade que a tentativa de contextualizar o presente gere reproduções de ideias, hoje, anacrônicas - tanto na promessa das novas tecnologias e modalidades artísticas, quanto no trato do renascimento da pintura. Resumidamente, o século 20 carregou as vanguardas europeias, o Retorno à Ordem e, depois, ainda inaugurou a chamada “arte contemporânea”, mais ou menos no meio do caminho, entre a década de 1950 e 1960, já que não existe um senso comum sobre o seu ponto de partida ou artífice principal. O fato é que tudo isso transformou a forma como a História da Arte contava sua estória – anteriormente, na sua maior parte, pictórica, representativa e ligada à fruição estética. Antes que esse século terminasse, a ressaca daquilo que vinha sendo produzido – uma arte conceitual, política e racional – trouxe a recuperação da pintura como linguagem. No Brasil, isso se realizou com a chamada Geração 80, um grupo de artistas, dos eixos Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo, que ganhou espaço para os seus trabalhos “desinteressados” no que as últimas décadas vieram inovar. Dessa forma, dizer que a pintura atualmente é uma linguagem ultrapassada pelos modos de produção contemporâneos é viver uma nostalgia dos anos 1960, no qual pairava a utopia das novas manifestações artísticas e relacionamento entre arte e vida. Da mesma forma, retomar o discurso de que a pintura está de volta, coloca questão em qual momento ela realmente deixou de existir.

Voltando ao estúdio da artista, em uma das salas estão dois quadros maiores: a imagem de um avião, em meio a um fundo preto [quase estelar] e o retrato de um pato. Sem dúvida, existe entre eles uma conexão de ordem formal e temporal. Quero dizer, parecem ter sido feitos em uma mesma fase, pois o caráter gráfico é similar – as pinceladas são fortes, selvagens e os temas quase que completam o espaço inteiro da tela. Também existem cores em comum, principalmente um rosa que parece ter espirrado do avião para a ave, como uma rajada de tinta que saiu de um quadro e grudou noutro feito chiclete. De onde surgem essas personagens que a artista recria, ora com ar cômico, ora com certa melancolia? Quando perguntei qual seria o elo entre tantas imagens díspares, Ana citou o “encontro entre a máquina de costura e o guarda-chuva”[1], tomado como inspiração por Man Ray e todo o grupo de surrealistas, na década de 1920. Contudo, a ligação entre o universo das telas da artista não é uma colagem onírica de situações ou de escolhas aleatórias, mas o retrato de um mundo real, daquele que não configura coerência ou linearidade, mas tudo isso fragmentado, disposto de um jeito qualquer e que encontra regularidade na repetição desse jeito qualquer.

Embora já saibamos que a representação feita a partir de um modelo vivo e de uma fotografia possua resultados diferentes, não é essa a questão no trabalho de Ana. Ela não elege uma foto da internet pela imagem em si, mas porque aquilo que está nela lhe interessa. Também não tem a ver com a banalidade do ato ao acaso de escolher qualquer objeto como assunto da obra, porém de pesquisar algo que seja digno de eleição. Inegavelmente, a variedade de temas e modus operandi da sua pintura é grande. Olhar para a parede onde estão expostas as suas telas é ver uma linha do tempo muito contemporânea, trazendo à memória diversos artistas: Gauguin e Cy Twombly, Dubuffett e Richter, De Kooning e Rauschenberg e, é claro, Wolfgang Tillmans. Este último, antes que eu relacionasse a “constelação” de pinturas de Ana com o fotógrafo alemão, ela mesma o citou como referência. E ambos parecem compartilhar do mesmo universo, de fato. Assim como no trabalho de Tillmans, a reunião de diversas temáticas, ou seria melhor dizer “coisas” - da situação à paisagem, do caos ao objeto - propõe o mapeamento, aparentemente casual, dos componentes de um mundo ao acaso e incerto.

Talvez muito o que se esteja dizendo sobre Ana Prata seja uma tentativa de enquadrá-la em um tipo, até mesmo naquele que “faz tudo, de qualquer jeito”. Observar uma pintura da artista individualmente é uma experiência. Visualizar a não-conexão entre mais de uma delas é ter a possibilidade de captar, entre epifanias e catarses, a fragilidade com a qual nos movimentamos pela vida. Entre o mar e o presunto, entre o filme e a igreja. Nem tudo é perecível e algumas coisas não são possíveis.

[1] "Belo como o encontro casual entre uma máquina de costura e um guarda-chuva numa mesa de dissecação" é uma frase do escritor francês Isidore Ducasse [1809-87], mais conhecido como Conde de Lautréamont. Man Ray inspirou-se nessa citação e produziu a obra “L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse”, em 1920 e refeito em 1972. Trata-se de uma máquina de costura embrulhada por um cobertor e amarrada com um barbante.

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Paula Nishijima

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Defined tags for this entry: ana prata, instituto tomie ohtake, jovens pintores, pintura contemporânea

Monday, 18. March 2013

Reginaldo Pereira: da síntese formal ao desvio de sentido

Reginaldo Pereira é artista. Formou-se em arquitetura na década de 1990, uma época em que a linha “desconstrutivista”, segundo ele, prevalecia no pensamento dos jovens daquela geração. Não sei se foi por conta dessa “onda”, na qual ele não se identificava, que Reginaldo rejeitou a ideia de seguir na área arquitetônica.

Ele trabalha em um ateliê coletivo na Vila Madalena, bairro de produção de artistas e galerias de arte. “Você é o cara da edícula”, brinquei. Ele riu e reafirmou a minha sentença. O seu estúdio, tal como as suas obras, é organizado. Alguns trabalhos fixados no alto da parede com a ajuda de pranchetas, a maqueta da sua última exposição individual e um grande espelho circular foram as primeiras coisas avistadas.

ateliê de Reginaldo Pereira

Maiastra Ogum é um de seus últimos trabalhos. Descritivamente, trata-se de uma melancia penetrada por uma folha de Espada-de-são-jorge. Esta última é forjada em latão e recebe uma pintura que imita o padrão rajado nos verdes escuro e claro da planta. Reginaldo começa falando sobre o título construído para a obra, homenagem a Constantin Brancusi¹ [1876-1957], que dedicou uma série de aproximadamente 30 esculturas ao pássaro Maiastra - ave dourada do folclore romeno, que possui poderes mágicos, como o de curar cegos e rejuvenescer os velhos. O artista esculpiu esses pássaros ao longo de 40 anos, passando do mármore para o bronze polido e, a cada nova versão, as Maiastras foram emagrecendo, chegando, por fim, a um rastro de pouso sobre a base. No entanto, o formalismo – semelhança entre a última versão da Maiastra brancusiana e a Espada-de-são-jorge - não é o único ponto de encontro entre os dois artistas, uma vez que Ogum, orixá correspondente ao santo São Jorge, é o “sobrenome” da obra de Reginaldo. Não à toa esse batismo tem raízes na mitologia afro-brasileira, pois assim como Brancusi, ele adotou a referência mítica nacionalizada.

Maiastra Ogum, 2012 | melancia, latão cromado e madeira | dimensões variáveis
Foto: Edouard Fraipont

Os simbolismos de Maiastra Ogum são muitos. Contudo, essa é a segunda reflexão, porque a primeira questão colocada pela maioria dos espectadores é a verossimilhança da fruta e da Espada. “É de verdade?” - perguntam-se. O artista teve como motivação dessa união a semelhança entre a casca da melancia e o tecido da Espada-de-são-jorge. Disse que esta deveria ser feita de um material duro, cortante e, não poderia ser diferente, escolheu o metal. Impossível não relacioná-lo a artistas como Jasper Johns ou Joseph Kosuth, fundadores da arte contemporânea, da arte como tema da própria arte e suas obras como definições delas próprias. E existe no discurso de Reginaldo um quê de gosto pelo trivial. Apropriar-se do que já está pronto e não modificar muito. Ele não quer transformar os elementos e obter algo original. A busca está no relacionamento entre o que já existe na vida e o que pode ser reproduzido. Como não lembrar da Fonte² [1917], de Marcel Duchamp, que conferiu através de uma base o status artístico a um mictório? Mesmo a melancia de Reginaldo já estando contemporizada ao cenário atual, no qual uma escultura pode estar fora de qualquer apoio, ela retoma essa questão no momento em que adquire um suporte especial. A base onde reside a fruta é um design de autor. O artista desenhou para a escultura o que ele chama de “banquinho”, um suporte modular constituído por duas partes de madeira crua que se encaixam em forma de “x”. Se empilhados, convertem-se em Coluna Infinita. A autonomia da ideia de se agrupar e transformar-se reafirma o campo aberto de sentidos que Reginaldo procura alcançar.

E essa brincadeira de iludir os olhos e desviar os significados está presente essencialmente em outros trabalhos do artista. A série de desenhos feitos sobre espelho foi a descoberta de uma técnica³ eficiente para elaborar a estética que ele queria para as suas obras. São símbolos violentos [facas e giletes] que seduzem pela beleza e precisão com a qual foram realizados. O artista não perdoa a falta de acabamento e qualquer rebarba esquecida refletiria nela mesma um pedaço do mundo imperfeito. Mas isso não acontece, pois as lâminas são mais polidas que as reais e atraem rapidamente o olhar, submetido a uma falsa situação de perigo.

"Alvo", da série "Risca Faca", 2010 | madeira e espelho | 126ø cm

Por trás dessa linguagem de perfeição existe o esforço, por parte do artista, em imprimir um discurso político, explicitado nos títulos dos trabalhos. A exemplo da série Risca Faca, cujo nome carrega a repetição da sua forma, mas não só isso - a expressão popular remete a um universo político-social retratado pelo duelo de duas lâminas. As armas brancas são instrumentos pessoais e, assim como a espada de São Jorge, usadas para a defesa ou o ataque. Embora o espelho reflita a imagem de quem se olha, ele carrega em si a tensão dos simbolismos dessas armas e, por consequência, a razão pela qual elas existem. Agora a [in]certeza da veracidade das imagens não importa mais, o trabalho quando alcança as camadas macro de significado não precisa se apoiar na beleza ou na forma em si. Reginaldo encontra ressignificação ultrapassando a linha tênue entre o “eu e o mundo”.

E nossa conversa terminou com essa teia de reflexões sobre o que a arte pode provocar na vida dos indivíduos e na sociedade como um todo. É importante que exista, para além do olhar comovido do espectador, a possibilidade de diálogo entre ele e o discurso da obra. Ainda que isso não modifique em grandes instâncias a realidade daqueles que a observam, mas, de alguma forma, que os pensamentos instigados pelo conjunto de verbos visuais contidos nos trabalhos deem voz a mudanças de atitudes, sejam grandes ou pequenas.

¹ Constantin Brancusi [1876-1957] foi um escultor romeno, pioneiro da escultura abstrata moderna. Após frequentar a Escola de Belas Artes de Bucareste, mudou-se para Paris, em 1904, onde produziu a maior parte de suas obras. Pouco antes de morrer, deixou seu estúdio e todo o seu conteúdo para o governo francês com a condição de que o Museu Nacional de Arte Moderna reconstituísse o local como havia sido originalmente perto de Montparnasse. O layout do ateliê foi mantido até o último detalhe - com as esculturas, fotografias, discos, manuais e ferramentas - para satisfazer o desejo do artista de ter seu trabalho exibido em sua totalidade. Hoje, o ateliê de Brancusi fica aberto para visitação, na Praça Georges Pompidou, ao lado do Centro de mesmo nome, em Paris. Fonte: parisinfo.com

² Fonte [1917] é uma das obra mais célebres de Marcel Duchamp [1889-1968], expoente do movimento dadaísta. Exposta pela primeira vez no Armory Show, em 1917, causou opiniões controversas a seu respeito, que foram da rejeição completa à futura fruição puramente estética do objeto, inaugurada pelo ready-made duchampiano - “Os ready-made são objetos anônimos que o gesto gratuito do artista, pelo único fato de escolhê-los, converte em obra de arte.“ (Octavio Paz. Marcel Duchamp ou o Castelo da Pureza. p. 23)

³ O artista fez uma série de trabalhos, cuja técnica consiste em extrair o negativo de um desenho no espelho, ou seja, ele elimina a parte espelhada do fundo e o aquilo que resta forma a imagem.

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Paula Nishijima

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Wednesday, 13. February 2013

Nino Cais and his Intimate World of Objetcs

Visiting Nino Cais’ studio is something I wanted to do since I first saw his work while his room was being mounted for the 30th Sao Paulo Bienal. The artist’s own body and simple domestic objects such as buckets, pots, brooms and dishcloths, are material for the sculptures that compose his pictures. His artwork is intimately connected to his own life and personal objects that give the spectator the impression of getting familiar with the artist's home itself.

Nino Cais’ room at the 30th Bienal de Sao Paulo
Photo: Fundação Bienal / Leo Eloy

Nino's studio couldn't be anywhere else but his own house - a ground floor apartment with a lovely backyard in Pinheiros, Sao Paulo. Every corner of the house is filled with pictures, drawings and objects that Nino meticulously arranges along the walls and tables, composing a cosy ambient where one could spend a whole day observing and discovering a new thing by the minute.

Crazy about these curious objects, Nino usually wanders around small stores and buy all sorts of things, such as a weird comb made of nails to clean fishes (on the left) or a miniature carrossel made of sliced cans. "I like when I find an object that I can’t instantly recognize - I like to bring those objects home and let them be part of my world - with time they get intimate with my home and might end up being part of an artwork”, says Nino.

The studio, the only room facing the street, has a permanent spot for his dog Cintura [Waist, in Portuguese] close to the window where she carefully watches who passes by - barking when necessary - while her owner dives into his world of infinite images. Besides the pictures, objects and drawings on the walls, Nino’s studio has wonderful archiving drawers filled with reference images for collages, drawings and paintings.

We sit by the desk close to Cintura’s window to talk a bit about Nino’s work and life. He tells me he was raised in a very catholic family and away from the Visual Arts world. He actually had his first contact with Art at the church, when he started to write and direct religious plays and paint panels of saints. Having finished school and with no perspectives of work, Nino went to Minas Gerais aiming to study to become a priest. It was then that he had what he called a break-down, drop the religious studies and, with the help of a priest, got a scholarship to study Visual Arts at Santa Marcelina University, in 1997.

He confesses that at first he was a bit disappointed with what he found: “I had this fantasy that I’d become either a poet or a traditional painter with a beret over my head, but things were quite different at University. My painting used to be very realistic, I used to try to portray every single detail of a figure, people even called me ‘Rococo’ back then. Then, one day one of my teachers said something that changed it all: `Don’t look at the figure, look at the line’. And starting to pursue these lines I started to understand the subjectivity of things and the poetics that could be inside a line. So I realised I could be a poet without using a single word. I started to understand I could write poetry through the symbolism of objects - I reckon I am a poet who uses images instead of words”.

His first art piece (picture on the left), created when he was still at University, came from a sliced shirt where he made several knots. These knots were another striking point in Nino’s poetics: “It was then when I started my search for the silence. I noticed that things are always trying to settle down, to find their place of comfort, like sand on a water-glass, it moves until it finds this confort place. In nature, friction exists in this search for what I call silence place, that I started to link with sculpture. In the traditional sculpture the author acts over the material until it’s done, frozen, in silence. And I started to see the knot also as a sculptural act - the more I pull the knot, the more I tension it, more it finds this silence place. It’s a kind of tension that leads to the silence.”

This was when Nino started working with objects, creating tensions that lead to this “silence place”. A very strong piece from this time is a chair with porcelain cups and saucers under its legs, making a solid base with such delicate objects. The tension and at same time the perfect balance and serenity of these merged objects evoque silence.

And it was looking at this piece that Nino decided that his body should be part of these silent sculptures: “a chair always invites a body to sit on it - its shape is made to receive a body. Thinking about the tension of my body with that art piece - that was a chair where I couldn’t sit due to its fragile basis - I started to experiment new sculptures using my own body. I thought that if I started to merge my body with objects, I would make it eternal. And this process of me getting close to the objects was as if I was making a sculpture, looking for such silence place until I’m inside the object as part of it. It’s as if the objects were magnets for the human body, because if you really look at them, they are all shaped to interact with our own shapes.”

Nino’s work invites us to reconsider objects that surround us, paying attention to them under a different perspective. However, unlikely many contemporary artists, Nino doesn’t subvert found objects to make a comment about art itself, questioning what is or what isn’t art, neither intends to make a criticism of consumption society. Nino sees these objects with genuine tenderness and tranquility, showing us how they are part of our existence as human beings and give us the illusion of not being close to death, how they make us different to the animal world and are part of our human nature, part of our natural habitat.

In the process of making these sculptures, Nino searches for his place of silence, he tries to find the same belonging position that he believes things find naturally in nature. The artist’s body appears completely merged to these objects. Objects that the only reason of being is to interact with the human body. And when we look at his photos, made from the encounter of the human body with his natural habitat, it feels that all the elements found their place of being quiet and still.

Nino’s photo-sculptures make beautiful, silent image-made poems in perfect balance: odes to our bonds to our existence. And this is why Nino’s studio must be in his home: these encounters only happen by accident, when Nino unawarely bumps into an object and feels the tension. This reminds the artist how keen he is on Adelia Prado’s work and quotes the Brazilian poetess: “To write poetry I don’t expect a comet to cross the sky or a shooting-star to fall. I usually bump into poetry“.

So Cintura stopped barking and it was already time to go - I left Nino Cais’ with his object-made personal world, wondering what is the next one he may bump into.

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Júlia Frate Bolliger

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Tuesday, 16. October 2012

introduction: where I lived working at d (13)

1
A personal account of the time I spent working at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, 2012

This text is presented in 3 parts, as follows:

the apartment (introduction)
the city (place)
office (the main)

-

What always requires a series of intricate arrangements, apart from the mental preparation necessary to spend months away from home - such as postponing previous commitments, putting on hold stimulating projects, as well as meetings and conversations with people we like - is the willingness to rearrange timetables and personal finances in order to be able to live for an extended period of time away from our social and professional environment: that's what gives us the most work.

It was aboard an ICE train from Frankfurt airport to Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station that I arrived in Kassel one afternoon in early March. Asta V. was waiting for me on the railway platform. She told me that, just like me, she was also a Fellow of the Goethe-Institut, and had been there on the exact same platform a few days earlier when she arrived from Vilnius, in Lithuania. She kindly took me to the apartment where we would live together for the next few months, as we were both Goethe grant recipients, and then she went back to work.

Ostring 41

The attic apartment was divided into four different sized rooms, which were all furnished identically, and were inhabited by (each of the three residents- Asta V., Övül D., and me, with one of the rooms serving as a guest room. The entire apartment had a very low ceiling, and included a kitchen-laundry area, which was like a common living area.
The food and drinks were prepared and served amid intense fragmented conversations about work in the public program department of dOCUMENTA (13), about city life our respective places of origin and Kassel in Germany. Invariably, disjointed readings and discussions were held simultaneously about the booklet published by documenta, while conversations with affairs and relationships from the past and present were openly held on Skype, between music video battles and video screenings of films and American TV series shown during dinner. While all these activities were taking place, a somewhat temperamental Melanie would work ceaselessly and would not leave us alone for a minute, until she went to sleep.
And there was also our rude and noisy washing machine, which sometimes acted as if it were a fourth occupant in the house; an entity from the invisible world or something like that. In Kassel, at this stage of the documenta’s planning and preparation, simple everyday things life, such as resting or inviting someone to come by for a visit, were simply out of the question. Around that time, I recall now, the possibility of living as a collective in the city almost faded away, like a natural phenomenon. Everywhere, it was all about dOCUMENTA (13).
Every resident had guests stay in the house. But only a few, and they would come months later, during d (13)’s opening week.

One particular issue, which we were unable to change from beginning to end, and which gradually became almost impossible to believe, was the unforgettable fact that a few meters away, one of our neighbors was able to spend every weekend completely drunk, while blasting out an atrocious variation on a Balkan beat, while continuously rolling glass bottles until break them along the floor and banging on the doors of his house at full volume all night long! Shouts, blood, zombies on the stairs of the nightmare. On the other hand, back at home – while trying to deal with such an unbearable situation - the most fragrant Dead Sea salts or amethysts often wafted out from the bathroom: Turkish revitalizing baths.

A couple of months after Kassel, while I sit here and think about what to write, I notice, to my curiosity, the importance of a small anonymous painting had on my stay, and how this unknown painting deeply affected my every day life during that period. life those days. Found by me on a street quite randomly, during a field trip, the unframed painting depicts women carrying water jugs on their heads, thus transmitting the simplicity of life in an Ethiopian village. One way or another, such a scene brought me equilibrium, while comfortably filling the white space of my room, which overlooked the bike parked in the "Hof" (communal courtyard).

Photos: 1 - building facade, 2 - apartment, 3 - kitchen, 4 - bedroom

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Marcio Harum

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Friday, 10. August 2012

Interview 06: Rodrigo Bueno

A few weeks after coming back from the Amazon where my previous interview took place, I found myself again in a jungle-like surrounding. This time it was in the neighborhood of Lapa where I visited the artist Rodrigo Bueno in his mind blowing Ateliê Mata Adentro. I recorded a stimulating conversation while drinking a cup of coffee between banana trees, ferns and a little fountain. This will be my last interview for this blog, and I hope you enjoy reading it!

General view of the atelier Mata Adentro in the district of Lapa, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Rodrigo Bueno 2012

FR: You live and work in a beautiful house called, Ateliê Mata Adentro. Can you tell me something about this ongoing project where working and living seem to have a symbiotic relationship?

RB: A few years ago, I started to collect all kinds of garbage, especially wood which is widely available for free and can be reused so much. It's actually collected from the jungle which was naturally here, but now totally destroyed. (…) With these materials, I realized an exhibition in my home and invited people to see my work. The name of this show was “Mata Adentro” (“Mata” is the Portuguese word for Forest). What is Mata Adentro, this unconscious forest that we have inside, this vastness of diversity we don't touch much? The exhibition was thus an invitation to touch all these different senses, and it became a portal for all the sensations. [Speaking of celebrating the different senses:] we had such a good time celebrating it, especially when we can include food, music, all the disciplines. (...)
We have to take a closer look at all these cracks in the city concrete, where the green of the small ferns pop out, especially here in this humid climate. This is hope of some inner life and provoking us all the time. It's letting us know that apart from our presence here in the last few thousand years, we had millions of years of global strength and resource. The natives still carry those secrets. (…) I think the artist's goal is to sensitize the people or create machines that would make people relax and open their mind, to their own way of living and identity. But still, it would be just like a tool or an appetizer to the question that lies ahead, because you make your own path „Mata Adentro“.

FR: Where did that interest come from to work with nature and natural materials?

RB: To make a living, I had the opportunity to paint homes with decorative painting. I remembered the depictions of artists that came to Brazil during the empire and painted our forests, the nature and our habits. I started to enlarge it on the walls, and I realized how you can change a room from the inside out and give other dimensions to it. It was fascinating, but I decided to take it one step further from the inside out. My spiritual path had touched the same ground. Like, the buddha is not out there, it's inside you. (…) So what's inside, and where is it? Inside is outside, too. With my Ateliê I bring the nature inside, and at the same time you have the feeling you're outside. So, it's kind of a chamber or a way of experiencing it for a few moments. Once you touch this experience, you can propagate and repeat it elsewhere.

Cultivated found furniture series, Rodrigo Bueno.
Photo by Rodrigo Bueno 2012

Mata Adentro installation at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, at the group show Ecológica, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2010.
Photo by Rodrigo Bueno 2010

FR: With your work you stretch the limits of traditional qualifications given to the artistic medium. How would you define your own artistic practice and what's your philosophy?

RB: The constant movement of culture would be the philosophy of “Ateliê Mata Adentro”. We need to adapt to this constant movement. It's not like we have to behave in a certain way or have to follow certain patterns, but we have to dance to a certain rhythm. Everybody has a personal repertoire, and at the same time we share a lot unconsciously. (...)
I was always experimenting with different techniques to use these to express a deeper philosophy for what I was doing. And, giving meaning to what I was doing was the hardest or the most tough I can say. (…) After a certain period, I started to pay more attention to the process, and realized I've always been an artist. I think you have to focus a little more specifically on the process and give name to that. I would like to quote Leo Tolstoy, saying, “If you want to be universal, sing your village.”

FR: You chose to live in São Paulo, a concrete jungle, as I like to say. Which roll does the city, its urban structure and the valorization of nature play in your work?

RB: What capitalism has made of the concrete jungle is to create these temples called shopping malls. You don't look at the other. You look into a mirror for your wishes or desires to come true. The antagonism of it would be to touch the land under the concrete in my house. (…) When I moved into this house, I cracked the concrete floor and planted some plants, like these banana trees. They empower the space so much, because they are in constant movement. “We invite memory, share and have company.“ These are words that we hear most people have been longing for. (...)

FR: How do you think about ecology and sustainability in your work and also in regard to the city?

RB: I think ecology should be seen, worked out or researched as something closer to you then the Amazon. We humans need nature. How do we share it and its resources? Still we need some other sources of energy, and I think we need a reprogramming of values. (…) Sustainability is about sustaining nature and men being part of nature. I'm really interested in “ecosofia”, a new term that defines a philosophy of ecology. If you think about anthropology which deals with the characteristic of the human experience, and anthroposophy which goes back to Rudolph Steiner, ecosofia could be the other side of this thought triangle. Like you meet the creator and the man inside nature. (…)

FR: In 2008 you were invited to realize an ambitious project for the 28th São Paulo Biennial, nicknamed “Bienal do vazio” (The biennial of the void). Could you delineate your plans and ideas for this project and state why your work didn't take place in the end?

RB: It was an amazing tempting invitation to make celebrations with the groups that heroically live in the Ibirapuera park; the garden workers, the skaters, the rappers, the street dancers, the athletes. I wanted to invite them all for this 2000 m2 educational program in the biennial that never existed. We planned to have an open workshop where you could work with the garbage of the park, recycle things, plant, collect and eat.(...) Ibirapuera Park is the main park of São Paulo. A modernist project, which is too small for the city and thus hosts many different activities. Unfortunately, the biennial is like a spaceship that has landed there with no relationship to the park, its activities or to the city. (…) With my project for this biennial, I wanted to honor the natives, the blacks, the basis of my country and own identity and the name of the park. Ibiripuera means “place of rotten woods”. This name is so meaningful to me since I basically use wood in a place of rotten woods. (...)
In the end, my project became too political and too autonomous because I started dealing with political forces inside the park where the main biennial building stands. (…) Two days before the biennial opened, I decided to drop out since the core of my whole movement, which is honoring all these diversities, was not acknowledged.

Drawing workshop at the Equilibrium Point show at the Tomie Ohtake Institute installation, group show off the 29th São Paulo Art Biennale, curator Agnaldo Farias and Jacopo Crivelli. Photo by Rodrigo Bueno 2010

FR: As part of a parallel program to the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010, you presented your interactive installation „Ponto de Equilibrio“ at Instituto Tomie Othake. Which roll does the audience and audience participation play in your work?

RB: Due to the previous biennial in 2008, I got invited to create an installation between exhibition rooms in this museum.(...). I wanted to create an environment in this hall. Somewhere cosy where people can sit, take a look, eat, sing, and listen to music. Where they could feel at ease and realize that we have time. All the objects and materials I used were secondhand or garbage, totally disposed. Some sort of material that the city doesn't want to see, like the poor, the misery. I created branches where people could sit, hammocks and even made a shade with nets so it became a little more comfortable. (…) The result was like a labyrinth. The curator called it: An unfolding experience out of Helio Oiticica's work “Penetráveis”. These labyrinths like structures were made to embrace the audience. Once you enter them, you could experience other ways to relate to the space around you. It was some sort of laboratory of senses, a mechanism to be free and open to other possibilities of inner perception.

Earth Day! Plants offerings from our neighbours at the Openning of the Garden of Encounters project - "Jardín del Encuentro" , part of the MDE2007, Medellín, Colombia. Photo by Marta Salazar, 2007

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It was great to record my last interview with the artist Rodrigo Bueno on a sunny winter day, one week before I will go back to Germany. Many interesting conversations and studio visits have taken place with gratitude to the artists who provided an insight in their works, thoughts and interests. It has been enriching to experience the vibrant São Paulo art scene, and I really enjoyed writing about it! Thank you for your readership, and have fun reading the next posts for this blog.

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Felicitas Rohden

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Tuesday, 10. July 2012

Interview 05: Paulo Nazareth

It was in the middle of May that his show “Noticias de America” opened at Mendes Wood. It was an unusual, but very interesting gallery presentation and different from what I've seen so far in other galleries or museums in São Paulo. So I was happy to meet Paulo Nazareth on a sunny afternoon, a few hours before he was awarded the “Prêmio MASP Mercedes-Benz Price” at MASP- Museu de Arte de São Paulo for his fascinating body of work. “My english is left, do you know? It's not right english”, he said. That's how our interview started. It's like getting directions in a country where you don't really speak the language. And, there I found myself in that exact situation, being in Brazil and barely speaking Portuguese. However, we had a rich conversation, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Noticias de America [News from the Americas]
Ricardo Bassetti and Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, Brazil courtesy

FR:Your latest show „Noticias de America“ (“News from the Americas”) at Mendes Wood displayed documented performances, social sculptures, drawings and biographical portraits from your journey of several thousand miles through more than 15 countries in the Americas. What intrigued you about traveling by foot, and what were you hoping to experience on this journey?

PN: Since I was born in 1977, walking became very important to me. I saw other people walking, and I wanted to walk too. It's important because If I can walk, I don't need a car. If a car brakes or runs out of gasoline on the road, I have to wait for help. When I'm just by foot, I don't need to wait. (...)
When I went to the USA, I could not imagine taking a flight and arriving in New York. I needed Latin America in my feet. I needed to experience its culture before arriving in the US. That was very important for me. For me South and North America are one land, one kind of men, and there are no borders. Borders are political, not social. While I was traveling throughout the Americas, I experienced several problems. But these problems were often related to economical issues. If I would have money, I could cross the border with ease.
I had problems with the brazilian police. My face and my hair looked weird to them. My passport was not enough, they wanted to see my ID-card. (...) When I arrived at the Border to Honduras, I wore flip-flops and had dust on my feet. The police claimed that I was not Brazilian since I didn't wear any proper shoes. (…) And then I had problems in Mexico. There is a lot of corruption. The police thought it was strange that I wanted to take a boat to Cuba. I had to go with them, and they asked me many questions about the money and my friends house that I was supposed to stay at. It was my luck that I had a picture of Saint-Judas in my pocket. After Guadalupe which is the most important Saint of Mexico, Saint-Judas is the second Saint of Mexico. The police said it's okay to cross the border when having a depiction of the Saint with you.

Noticias de America [News from the Americas]
Ricardo Bassetti and Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, Brazil courtesy

Noticias de America [News from the Americas]
Ricardo Bassetti and Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, Brazil courtesy

FR: Your show had a very documentary character and showed many found objects throughout the Americas. How did you arrange your memories of the journey? Was there any conceptual referencing to social or economic tensions in South America while linking certain objects?

PN: In the exhibition everything is together and there are many similarities. (…) The displayed objects are all fragments of my journey. (…) Everything is linked to each other, maybe like a net.
(he places several objects on the table at which we are siting) For instance: Here is the Image of Saint-Judas and a little package of salt. This is just salt, but it's also a lucky charm since I associate something sacred to it. So there is a link and an existing dialogue between both items since there is something sacred to both of them.
I also think that the collective memory of South America is not linear. Although there are many differences, things are very related. Lets say: Brazil is one thing, Argentina, Paraguay, etc. are another thing, but it's all South America. For instance: The guarani people, an indigenous people from South America live in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil. For them it's one land, but after the colonization borders were created by politicians. It became a problem to cross the borders, and for the Guarani people it was impossible to walk to their relatives as they were used to before.

FR: In your interactive installation “Banana Market” presented at Art Basel-Miami, you signed Bananas and sold them for 10 Bucks each. What did you want to achieve with this gesture?

PN: I wanted to tell something about the market and the business (Art business, War business, Mafia, etc.) (...) Its about the history of Latin America, about the dictatorship that started in Guatemala and affected many other countries. It started with The United Fruit Company, the banana business that flourished in the early and mid-20th century. Its a period of social revolution, agrarian reforms and disappropriation. I wanted to say something about the big business of The United Fruit Company and the history of land monopoly. The bananas that I sold are a symbol for this part of history and it's monopoly powers.

Art Market / Banana Market Art Positions - Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011

FR:Your work has a very specific formal quality. What is your relation to material, its value and its aesthetics?

PN: I work with good materials that I find in the land, in the streets. Because why should I buy a piece of plastic when I meet it in the land? It's good and guaranteed. The producer of an artifact assures me a guaranty of 100 or 1000 years before it degrades. (...) Instead of making something myself which has no guaranty, I prefer working with materials that the world offers me. My relation to material is by guaranty.

FR: You live and work in a Favela near Belo Horizonte. Can you tell me something about your personal background?

PN: Originally, I'm from Governador Valadares, a city that I really like. (…) Today I live in Santa Luzia – Palmital, a favela near Belo Horizonte. There is an other culture. A culture of improvisation in daily life. So my language is also related to improvisation.

FR: In your work you often deal with subjects such as race, ideology, class struggle, etc. What interests you about exploring these themes in an artistic context and where did that interest come from?

PN: It's related to my own family history and their memories. But more than that, it's also related to the memory of Brazil which is very dark. The history of the slave memory, the memories of the dictatorial times, etc. (...) My work is about that mix and meeting of many people in Brazil. Religion is mixed, race is mixed and even philosophy is mixed. There are many layers. (…) I think it's about the desire of that mixed cultural memory. We brazilians don't know where we're from. We have indigenous and black roots. Where are we from? From Africa, but Africa is big. Many people, cultures and distinguished Orishas. When the black people arrived in Brazil, these diverse african cultures and religions were mixed. (...)

FR: Your performances and works have a social character, are very participatory and related to public space. Do you feel a kind of responsibility towards society while doing your work, and has that also to do with your personal background?

PN: I want the art object not to be finished in the gallery or an art collection, it belongs to many people. There is an ongoing dialogue between the art object and the viewer. Wherever you see the object, if it's in the internet, a magazine, a newspaper, a museum etc. it's also yours. The object creates a dialogue which is very important. (…) It's like a cooperation. You have one window, I have another. When you see the object, there is an interaction between your and my history. The work functions as a sort of meeting point.

FR: In a press release I read that you embody the idea of the artist as a sort of connector or performative decoder. How do you relate to this idea or approach?

PN: I want to live this and stay with people. For me being an artist is like any other job. A taxi driver is also a connector, but he's not always aware of that. I don't think so much about the tradition of performance in art, but more about its condition in life. I want to open up this dialogue between art and life. (...)
Many people, many windows...

Untitled, from the series News from the America, 2011/2012
photo printing
Courtesy Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, Brasil

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Monday, 2. July 2012

Interview 04: Thiago Cavalli Azambuja and Simone Donha

What triggers two artists to leave Sao Paulo and move to the Amazon Rainforest? I wanted to find out and visited Thiago and Simone in the middle of the jungle. After a long journey by plane, bus and boat, I arrived in Tupana about 200 km south-west of Manaus. There are approximately 30 indigenous families living along the riverside. It was a life-changing experience to be surrounded by endless trees, water, beautiful animals and the daily life of the Tupana community. I hope that the following interview will give a glimpse of the intriguing project „Casa do Rio“ runned by both artists and shows why their contribution to the community of Tupana can be understood as part of their artistic practice.

FR: You are both artists who studied Theatre and Performance in Sao Paulo and moved a few years ago to Tupana, Amazon. When did you have the idea to come here? What made you decide to live and work in this remote area?

TCA: We arrived at a different times. I came in 2009 as part of a project that I was about to do in Sao Paulo. When I came to visit Tupana, I fell in love with the place, and I decided that this is the place where I would like to live. At the same time I wasn't satisfied living in Sao Paulo. While I was trying to find my own artistic identity, I couldn't fit myself inside the patterns of the art world. Relating to this me and Diogo, a friend of mine decided to build a place where we could live and be - as artists, as people.

FR: And how was it for you Simone? You came later.

SD: The idea of coming here occurred to me during an exchange project between two universities in Germany where Thiago, Diogo and I were invited to do performances with a group of students. We all knew each other from our studies in Sao Paulo. During a dinner we were talking about the experiences of building a house in the Amazon and how interesting it could be to collaborate with these students as a performance group in this place.
At that time I was living in Berlin for four years and we decided to gather six months later for the project in the Amazon. When I arrived in Tupana in the beginning of 2011, I had the idea to stay for a short amount of time, but I passed much more time then I expected. (…) Now I'm in my second year.

Casa do Rio

FR: You set up an artist residency called „Casa do Rio“ and invite international artists to stay and work here for a certain amount of time. What interests you about creating a place to develop ideas and artworks in the jungle far away from any art network, museums, galleries, etc.?

TCA: (…) I'd like people and guests of Casa do Rio to experience the extreme environment, the totally different culture and the people that live here. There is something that can come out of this meeting between people that stay in our house, the inhabitants of Tupana and us. In the beginning, after the house was finished, everything was concentrated here. It became a meeting place rather than a place where you just live and eat. The meaning of a house grew so much and developed into a house that's going to be built together. (…)
Besides actual works than can be created over here, I'm specifically interested in the relation that one can create and the unique experience you have here. For me it's important to share this with artists that are open to a process-orientated way of working.

FR: While I was here, I often heard you talk about the importance of exchange. What interests you in particular about this exchange, and what kind of artists do you invite for the residency in regard to that?

TCA: What interests us is an intense exchange between us, the artists that come to visit and the community (…)I was always looking for the subjectivness of art. You can experience that in a single artwork or between relationships. For instance: when you share a space and stay together for most of the time, sleep in the same room, cook together, etc. this subjectivness can transform you as an artist and as a person. That's what I was looking for and wanted to achieve with Casa do Rio.

SD: It can not only transform you, but also the people of Tupana. This exchange between us and the visiting artists made them think of their abilities. They know a lot about materials, nature or have specific ways to make tools or other objects. Since they live far away from town, they are excluded from society. (…) Handicrafts are just part of their daily life and do not mean anything special to them. I think it's interesting to exchange their technology and put value in the simple things they do. Nowadays their self-esteem has grown a lot and they are more aware of their skills. Visiting artists or other visitors often ask to show them how to make certain things.

FR: How does the environment affect your own artistic work. Could you describe the difference between working here and Sao Paulo?

SD: While I was living in Sao Paulo, I was working a lot with theatre, performance and dance. Here I think more about videos or writing. The landscape and the sounds are so strong that it sometimes feel like being in a movie. (...)In general it's often a question or the urgency of a situation that moves me to do and make something. (…) Here in Tupana I took the position of a teacher and that's a very new situation for me.

TCA: When I was in Sao Paulo, I always tried to do things that somehow could be seen or recognized. Since I came here to Tupana, I've been experiencing a lot of differences. Our first work was related to Architecture. We had to built a house although we had no clue about wood and construction. After finishing the house, a new project started. I call it the social sculpture. The people of Tupana started to visit us more and more. From that we learned their needs and then we said: Lets work with that! That means: becoming a teacher, an active member of the community and recently being active with political work.

FR: Do you think that this attitude is related to you being a performer and not something else, e.g a sculptor?

TCA: Yes, totally I think. Even during our studies at the university we had this approach. We often had to deal with unusual or quite new situations. (…) I think this openness comes from the performance.

The kids of Tupana in front of their new school.

FR: During my stay I noticed that the community of Tupana plays an important role in your daily life, e.g. you initiated or squatted the first school in this area. What exactly interests you about the interaction with the people of Tupana and do you also see that as part of your artistic practice?

TCA: Yes, it's like taking mud on your hands and being able to make something out of it. (...) Once you start working with them, you see how different things become and you don't want to stop. For instance, the meeting place in Tupana was totally abandoned before. Now they start working on it and review the sense of community.

SD: In the beginning, when we decided to squat the first school, I realized that this would be a huge responsibility. It's beautiful to see how fast they learn and how much they improve themselves. (...) For me it's more about creating a perspective or a curiosity for things when I teach the young people.

FR: In the beginning of the interview you claimed that the self-esteem of the Tupana community grows while artists or visitors show great respect for their handicrafts. Can you give me a practical example of this exchange and what resulted out of this collaboration?

SD: As I said before, the exchange between us, the artists and the community, made them think of their abilities. Thiago and I started to built a bridge. One artist named Enrique, from Spain, was very eager to get in touch with the people. He visited them a lot and learned some of their traditional handicrafts, their ideas and ways of living. Even nowadays, they still ask us when he comes back.
For example Mutuka, our neighbour boy, who started showing us how to make kanus, pedals or bow and arrow. Or Branca, the lady who makes beautiful baskets out of palm tree leaves. (…)
The close connection to the community was even for me a big change. In the city, it's so comfortable to live your life. You forget how much you can actually make or achieve in daily life and how strong one can be. This exchange shows you how big your limit is, and you realize a lot about yourself. (...)

Branca shows us how to make a basket out of palm tree leaves

TCA: There are two important issues that I can relate to this question. The first one is autonomy. Once you realise that most of the things you need are in your backyard, you don't depend that much on money anymore. The consume system and the paranoia of it in our world become quite irrelevant. I don't know if freedom is the right word, but you can make other choices. The other issue is related to our relation to nature. When nature is so close, it changes your perception and feeling for waste. For example, if I pollute the water, I cannot drink the water, because there is no water treatment here.

FR: Are there any plans and things you hope to achieve in the near or long distant future?

TCA: It's totally a work in progress. It's amazing how fast things are changing here. (…)I'm looking forward to what will come.

SD: When I started teaching this year, my goal was and is to teach the children how to read and write. I hope to achieve this until the end of the year. Later I can pass it on to someone else so I can focus more on the general work with the community.

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Felicitas Rohden

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Monday, 25. June 2012

Interview 03: Juliana Kase

It was by coincidence, while visiting Galeria Pilar that I met Juliana during the set-up of her show. She was about to draw on the wooden wall that was just installed in the gallery space, when we had a nice conversation about her work. This time I wasn't able to record an interview in her studio, since she was in London and I was catching the plane to Manaus, where my next interview will take place. I hope you enjoy the following e-mail interview.

FR: You were born in Curitiba, live and work in Sao Paulo and have Japanese relatives. Would you like to tell me about your roots and how this cultural background affects your work?

JK: I was born in Curitiba but I grew up in São Paulo since early childhood, so I consider the last my hometown. My grandparents came from Japan in the twenties during a hard economical recession. As the other immigrants that traveled half of the globe in a ship to Brazil, their intentions were to save money and go back to their country. This never happened because the harsh reality that they encountered here made this land become their own. It was different from North America where immigrants went to stay. So it's possible to say that North America is based in a dream about the future and Brazil in a disillusion of the present. My grandparents learned to love this country and didn't want to go back to Japan when they could, but this scenario is deeply rooted in the Brazilian culture and in Nipo-Brazilian culture. I can't affirm that it is the reason I'm so interested in contextual work and in reality-fiction relation, but it is from where I work.

Jogo [Game], 2011/12, fotograma emoldurado [framed photogram], 55 x 44 cm cada [each], detalhe [detail]

FR: Your latest solo show „Andamentos para lugar sem sombras“ (Progression in space without shadows) at Galeria Pilar displays three paperwork series with a repetitive character and a site-specific drawing on a wooden wall, connecting the gallery space with the garden. How would you describe your motivation and ideas for creating this ensemble of works and what are the connections between the pieces?

JK: The works in the show were made during 2011 and 2012. I was interested in exploring the repetition of images and it's possible meanings. Repetition to observe similarities and differences, repetition to juxtapose time, repetition and linearity, repetition to form an unique image. I don't see huge differences between the works on paper and the wooden panel (paper is another stage of the wood anyway). All the works are framed (the wooden panel is framed in the architecture and not in regular frames as the others) and this is a subject or a second subject in each group. The works have the same concern which is to refer to the context or to the condition in which they're found.

Jogo [Game], 2011/12, fotograma emoldurado [framed photogram], 55 x 44 cm cada [each], vista da instalação [installation view]: Galeria Pilar, Brazil, 2012

Contenção II [Retention II], 2012, grafite e cera s/ madeira [graphite and wax on wood], 335 x 642 cm, vista da instalação [installation view]: Galeria Pilar, Brazil, 2012

FR: What are your main aesthetic references and where else does your inspiration come from?

JK: I believe my main references are not aesthetics, but approaches towards art. I can point to the works of filmmakers Werner Herzog and Ingmar Bergman; the legacy of artists such as Sol Lewitt, Kazimir Malevitch and Kurt Schwitters; the investigations with light and image by Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy Nagy. Recently I'm very touched by the Bauhaus will of creation and transformation.

FR: While I was visiting you during the set-up of your show at Galeria Pilar, I noticed your love and excitement for material handling. The way you talked about the subtle silk screenings which were leaning against the gallery wall and the huge site-specific drawing that was being drawn made me think: How important is material and materiality for you?

JK: In visual language materiality is the means by which ideas turn into communication. In art the means are not transparent as Mel Bochner said, they speak as much as the content. The communication through material is not precise and direct. I find the possibilities of understanding and the demands of the chosen medium very rich and challenging. Though ideas can be expressed by immaterial means such as the textual language, in my work so far, the fact of being present persists. I try to respond to the questions I find in our times using a powerful and often misjudged tool which is detail, the subtlety you mentioned. The material itself is not the goal for me, it doesn't precede the work, but it makes me think of unplanned contents, as well as, adds unpredicted meanings. This puts me to work in the first same ground of the rest of the world which is physical reality.

FR: Your work mainly consists of drawing and fragile paper constructions e.g. the work „Distância“ or „Arco“. Why do you like to work with paper and what interests you about this material?

JK: Paper is primarly used as a two-dimensional means and it's different from the canvas because it is historically linked to daily life use and not to art history. In the installations I used paper as a three-dimensional means considering that the reality of the image is the same as the reality of everything else. Mira Schendel has used paper in this direction as well. When I made the installations you mentioned, paper seemed a proper medium. It is as ephemeral as the situations they were put into.

Distância [Distance], 2008, colagem s/ papel [collage on paper], vista da instalação [installation view]: Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil, 2008

FR: Within the framework of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2012, curated by Artur Żmijewski, you recently contributed to their Open Call. ArtWiki.org started with this biennale as an open platform for artists to share artist biographies as a free and open historiography for contemporary art. What exactly interested you about putting your artist material for research investigations online and sharing political leanings?

JK: The position of Artur Zmijewski interested me because I found it courageous to admit that there are problems in the art system. Although I don't agree with the solutions he proposes. I decided to apply to the open call to say what I think about his text "Forget Fear" from inside the channel opened by the biennale. I didn't put any images of my work, as I understood the aim of ArtWiki so far is not the art work itself but it is an effort to attend to the growing necessity of stating ideas.

FR: In your profile at ArtWiki.org you stated: „So, the issue here is not to make art as a protest or talk about politics through art, but to position yourself in the society as an active political person. This means to live with ethics and a critical view always.„ How do you express ethics and this critical view in your artistic work? Is there a formal outcome or is it solely related to the way you think and live as an artist?

JK: As I also said on the same text, I don't believe that art has the mission of making people see something. Art can only be there. The understanding of it doesn't belong to the artist, it belongs to the receiver. So I don't make art in order to express ethics and critique, but it is there. I.e. I wouldn't make a work to say something that is not a genuine matter for me, this is work with ethics. I like to be concerned by the context in which my work will be present. This is to have a critical view, in my opinion. The subject an artist works with is connected, but not in a direct way, to their position as a citizen or as a political individual. One doesn't exclude the other, precisely because art doesn't work under the same logic as mathematics.

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Felicitas Rohden

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Thursday, 31. May 2012

Interview 02: Maurício Ianês

It was during the busy week of the 8th Edition of the São Paulo International Art Fair that I met Maurício Ianês at a garden party. We had a nice conversation about his work and I was interested to introduce an artist with a performative approach to this Blog. On a monday morning I recorded a fruitful interview with his studio cat and the guy that likes to laugh.

FR: Your work consists of Performances, Videos, Installations and often involves a strong body involvement. Was there a crucial moment that triggered you to become a performative artist?

MI: Yes, when I started building up my artistic view, I was always intrigued by how art can affect both the viewer and the artist and how art objects can act between those two extremities. At that time I was very disappointed about art. I was thinking that my thoughts will never reach the viewer properly through my artwork and the viewer will never be able to respond to me properly through an object. I started thinking that the best way to do that is to be there with the public. I got to know Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, all those big performance artists from the 60 & 70s and I decided to do that myself. (...)
I think body is language. Just like you can push language to poetry or to its limits, you can push body language to that extreme. By this I don't mean challenging my own body to an extreme but to show the artist as someone who is not empowered. To break this power play between the artist and the public and expose myself in this limited situation just to break these hierarchies. Its like humanizing the artist through an extreme situation.

FR: How do you visualize and conceive your work?

MI: I see my work as a book, and each work is a bit like a chapter. I'm interested in the relationship between the artist and the public through language. Besides that, I want to question language itself, be it artistic language, verbal language, or body language. I want to see how this socially functions in an artistic context.

"Zona Morta / Dead Zone" 2007

FR: The work “Zona Morta“ or your latest performance “Not no“ that you presented at „Arti et Amiticiae“ in Amsterdam can be described as actions that last a certain amount of time. How do physical and mental limits influence the way you approach, conceive and interact with your work.

MI: (…) When I think of a work or a performance, I never think it would be impossible for me to handle it. I just dive into it. I never rehearse for example. It's just like: lets go! It's like a break in my daily life. I want to experience something new, just like the public. So when the public gets inside a room, sees a performance or an artwork, its an experience and I want to have this fresh feeling for me too. I do not get prepared for a performance through concentration or meditation, but it does affect me mentally.

FR: And in what way does it affect you mentally?

MI: My performances are always a life experience. Actually one performance changed my life personally. It was during the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2008 where I stayed 15 days in the biennial building, living there in silence. I got in there totally naked. I didn't have any possession, anything to eat. I only depended on public donations. Being naked in the biennial building was very extreme for me to start with. (...)The public was very receptive to that performance but at the same time they were very demanding. (...) One of the laws of the performance was: Don't judge! I had to consume everything. So I had to wear all the clothes, eat all the food, etc. It was very extreme. It was not only physically but mentally and emotionally demanding. I basically had to forget myself. I was a mirror of the public, I was them being totally absorbed. For almost a year I was traumatized by the exposure in the exhibition, the availability and these negotiations with the public. I do think it was a life-changing experience.

"Untitled (the kindness of strangers)", 2008. Image by Amílcar Packer.

FR: You perform alone or in collaboration, but never instruct others to accomplish a performance for you. Which roll plays your own body/presence in your work?

MI: In my performance works, I generally question the relationship and communication between the artist and the public. So it has to be me, otherwise it would be fake. I'm not trying to say that it has to be authentic, because it never is. It's always mediated and within a context. But, since I'm posing a question and looking for an answer, I think it has to be me. (...)
How do you relate to things that exist but can not be put into words? They're purely abstract entities that can not be touched. They are real; they are between relationships; they are within us, and I kind of want to expose them. I want to deal with them.

FR: Formal aspects of Language and Communication seem to play an important roll in your installations. Which exploration interests you there?

MI: As I said before, there is that philosophical questioning of language that interest me. I'm very fond of how Derrida, Wittgenstein and Heidegger approach philosophy or a philosophical text. They try to explore and deconstruct a single word and see where each part comes from. They try to rethink the world through the meaning of a specific word. (...)
But then it gets to a point where language becomes all abstract to someone who is not into philosophy. It becomes useless and touches that unspeakable part of language which is very important. So I like to think about that. I think a lot about poetry, especially about modern or contemporary poetry. Stéphane Mallarmé or the Brazilian Concretists for instance, thought visually about poetry and exposed the words in the pages almost like a drawing (…) I'm interested in the physical and emotional aspects of language. I like to remove the words from the book, think about them spatially and dissociate them from there source object. (…)

"Salvo o Nome", soloshow, 2010
Image by Edouard Fraipont

FR: Are there any artists that play an example role in your work and remain important for you?

MI: Yeah, definitely, even though I don't see them so clearly in my work. I do think that Bas Jan Ader remained important to me since art school. What I like about his work is this simplicity and extreme conceptualism with a very emotional input.(...)
Joseph Beuys' way of thinking was always a huge influence and then of course Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Marcel Broodthaers. They made me think of performance.

FR: Performances are always bound to a specific situation and thus have an ephemeral character. How do you deal with its documentation and in which way do you integrate it into your installation based work?

MI: That's a very good question because I'm thinking a lot about that. In my next show I'm going to show some performance documents for the first time. I usually don't see these documents as an artwork itself. I don't think a photograph or a text that you read during the performance should go to an exhibition. But I did two performances in 2010, and 2011, that left very interesting documents. (...)
A t-shirt and a book were leftovers of the performance “The writing“. They made me think about how the documentation can be important or have autonomy from the performance. (...)

Posted by

Felicitas Rohden

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Monday, 7. May 2012

Interview 01: Marcelo Cidade

It's the beginning of may and today I will do my first studiovisit for the blog. I am meeting Marcelo Cidade in his huge studio in the neighbourhood Belem. It was during one of my first days in Sao Paulo that his show at Galeria Vermelho opened. I was intruiged by his work and wanted to know more about it. On a sunny afternoon we had a long and interesting conversation about his works, thoughts and motivations.

FR: When did you know that you want to become an artist. Was there a specific entry point?

MC: My friends from school were going to the beach on the vacation. My family never went to the beach and I started hanging out on the streets of SP with my skateboard. Between my house and downtown I perceived a lot of social disruption. Problems that I didn't perceive in my private school. After the experiment with the skateboard in the 90s, I became very interested in graffiti. I started to go to trainlines, to paint trains, metro, etc.
I can say that this interest in graffiti was my first interest in art. Later in the artschool I was introduced to art from the 70s, performance art, urban actions, and interventions in the city. I became interested in the actions of Cildo Meireles and Helio Oiticica. I started to perceive that my actions in the street were very political and I was wondering how my actions could be political without using the aesthetics of graffiti.(…)

FR: You currently have a show at Galeria Vermelho. Can you tell me something about your displayed works, your ideas and about the title „Quase Nada (almost nothing)“.

MC: Just like in all my previous exhibitions the title „Quase nada (almost nothing)“ results out of a process that starts in the streets. (…) In my last exhibition at Vermelho, the title „Avant-Gard is not dead“ was related to the idea of avant garde and punk. With the title of the current show, I relate indirect to a work by Helio Oiticica called „Almost cinema“. It's a series of films where he contructs a movie by projecting stills in a fast sequence.
The reference to brasilian modernism is much more conceptual. It relates to a certain attitude. If you take out all the formal aspects of their works, you can perceive a very social motivation to lead life in a different way. This aspect is often forgotten. (…) I try to be subversive while relating to brasilian modernism with almost no forms / works in this exhibition.

...e agora, José? [...And now, José?] (2012) Acrílica e madeira/ acrilic on wood 350 x 500 x 200 cm

Last year I found a book with fotos of the construction of Brasilia. The first page showed a bilboard, that seemed very bizar to me. I was intruiged by it, since it showed Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott’s campaign for the Brazilian presidency, in 1960. It was the first democratic campaign after the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the panel presents the candidate wearing his military uniform beside Juscelino Kubitschek dressed as Borba Gato.
I wanted to paint it and used the B&W photography as a reference. I wanted to emphasize that this is something from the past so I rearranged the panels like a puzzle on the backside of the billboard. In Brasil it's quite common to reuse panels of old billboards in that way for new propaganda.
The title „...e agora, José“ is a reference to the the title of a poetry book by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was part of the modernist literature movement. (...)

Adição por subtração [Addition by Subtraction] (2012) Vidro/glass/150x 300x20cm

The work „Addition by substraction“ relates to the work „Intra murus“ that I showed in the SP Biennale in 2006. I was interested in the idea of displacement between the private and the public space. In my newest work I wanted to pursue this idea by determining an area with glass fragments in a white cube situation. By protecting this area, I create a kind of value concept although the inside and the outside are equal.
Besides that I start a dialog with the idea of architecture. (...) It refers not only to a frame, but also to a window. Here the windowglass fragments are comming out of the wall and do not evoke the feeling of protection but of aggresion. This confrontation interested me.

FR: The spikes on top of the black gallerywall recalled your work „Addition by substraction„ while I was leaving the gallery. Is there an intentional relation between the architecture of the gallery and this work?

MC: No, not only the gallery has spikes; you can find them all around SP. They are meant to protect people in their houses, but in fact it only increases the violence problems in posh neighbourhoods.
So when I show them inside the gallery, I create a confrontation with people that live behind spike surrounded walls. People who come to the gallery expect to see something beautiful. But exactly the opposite happens. They are confronted with a memory of their own surrounding. (…) My idea of bringing the SP problems inside the gallery is to remind the people who buy art that art can be a problem. And for me art becomes interesting when it creates a problem.

FR: You generate works between art and society, between public space and studio practice. How would you frame the formal vocabulary of your work? Do you use both the aesthetics of the streets and the artcontext?

MC: For me the aesthetic results out of the conceptual preoccupation.
I think much more about concepts and how I can realise this concept. The aesthetic question comes after that. All the time. (...)

FR: In the beginning of the interview you told me that you like brasilian modernism and that you often relate to their formal aspects by appropriating certain forms.

MC: Yes, off course I have my tastes, but I don't want to be misunderstood when I talk about forms. Because I think modernism is often misunderstood. People tend to forget about the concepts of the so called avant garde and only focus on the formal aspects. I think it is important to find a balance between concept and form. Because if there is no form, you're gonna talk about philosophy. Not about art.

FR: You do not only gain inspiration and material from public space, but you mostly intervene. What is it exactly that interests you about intervening in public space?

MC: It's part of my daily life. (…) I think the idea of intervention is for me much more related to the use of the city and its public spaces. In SP we don't really have public spaces, like you have in Europe. Europeans use the public space in a fantastic way, because they don't have enough space. Here we have a lot of space but we are not using it in a good way.
The idea of intervention is a way of reclaiming the streets. I started with this while I was hanging around in the streets. There were a lot of problems and I wanted to change it a little bit. I tried to do something through intervention.

FR: How important is the city SP for you since you are a real Paulista? Is your work very city related or could you make the same work if you were living for instance in Manaus.

MC: I live in a metropolis and some problems that I perceive here, are almost the same as in London, New York or Paris. Off course I can deal with some „Paulista“ questions, but when I'm abroad I see that these problems are not necessarily bound to SP, but are a result of metropolises.
And for sure, when I would have grown up in Manaus or Bahia, I would perceive the world around me in a different way. I think to understand the artist today, it is very important to consider his or her environment.
(...)

FR: While questioning the social system and its political structures, do you feel a kind of responsability towards society as an artist? Especially in a city like SP where the difference between poor and rich is so obvious.

MC: I think my preoccupation is much more to be a good citizin and to have ethics. In this country, ethics is a very good value. We had a lot of corruption during the past and due to that I think its important to have a good and honest behaviour.
While being ethical and respectfull in my daily life, I think my work is also gonna be ok. If I would be a shitty guy, then my work would probably be the same.

Posted by

Felicitas Rohden

at 16:39 | Comments (17) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, 1. September 2011

Mostrar

Se podemos hoje falar sobre pensamento curatorial, ou melhor dizendo pensamento sobre exposições, dois autores são fundamentais para a constituição desse campo e a abertura de novas perspectivas no âmbito da história da arte.

Bruce Altshuler, autor de uma obra de referência, “The AvantGarde in exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century” publicada em 1994 em New York, bem como da recente coletânea de documentos sobre exposições, "Salon to Biennial - Exhibitions That Made Art History", concebida e editada por Altshuler para a Phaidon Press. O livro é composto especialmente por fotografias de instalações e displays de exposições, mas também por textos de catálogos, jornais e revistas. No prefácio da obra, assinala o autor o interesse crescente da história da arte em exposições e instituições artísticas, abrindo novas abordagens para o entendimento das práticas artísticas e curatoriais contemporâneas.

No entanto, o primeiro volume editado reafirma uma seleção restrita à exposições ocorridas na Europa e nos Estados Unidos com exceção da primeira exposição do Grupo Gutai em Tóquio, e da última exposição de vanguarda em Petrogrado, São Petersburgo, antes da Revolução, definido uma geografia que inclui apenas Paris, Berlim (e outras cidades alemãs como Munique, Dresden e Stuttgart) Londres e Nova York. Ademais, a própria cronologia estabelecida para esse volume parece seguir uma determinada leitura da história da arte moderna que inicia com a ruptura dos impressionistas com os Salões da Academia Francesa e a Exposição Universal de Paris em 1867 e vai resultar na afirmação da abstração norte-americana no pós-guerra.

Edifício da Exposição Universal de Paris de 1867

Continue reading "Mostrar" »

Posted by

Vinicius Spricigo

at 18:57 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

(Page 1 of 4, totaling 47 entries) next page »

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Wednesday, 19. June 2013

Alex Cerveny: do irreal ao extraordinário

Tuesday, 28. May 2013

Lucas Simões: sobre paisagens imemoriais

Wednesday, 8. May 2013

Among the threads of f.marquespenteado

Thursday, 2. May 2013

Jorge Menna Barreto: das palavras esculpidas à potência do silêncio

Tuesday, 9. April 2013

Ana Prata e a teia morfológica das coisas

Monday, 18. March 2013

Reginaldo Pereira: da síntese formal ao desvio de sentido

Wednesday, 13. February 2013

Nino Cais and his Intimate World of Objetcs

Tuesday, 16. October 2012

introduction: where I lived working at d (13)

Friday, 10. August 2012

Interview 06: Rodrigo Bueno

Tuesday, 10. July 2012

Interview 05: Paulo Nazareth

Monday, 2. July 2012

Interview 04: Thiago Cavalli Azambuja and Simone Donha

Monday, 25. June 2012

Interview 03: Juliana Kase

Thursday, 31. May 2012

Interview 02: Maurício Ianês

Monday, 7. May 2012

Interview 01: Marcelo Cidade

Thursday, 1. September 2011

Mostrar

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