One of the main lines of action for the exhibition programme of the Museu de Arte do Rio –
MAR is the history of Brazilian art, giving special attention to the constant critical revision of
its principles. Broadening this vocation, under the management of Instituto Odeon, MAR
presents A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil], a panoramic exhibition surrounding questions
and projects of colour from Brazilian artistic production, under the curatorship of Paulo
Herkenhoff and Marcelo Campos.
Brought together here are iconic works from the 20th century, which reveal artworks that
remain little-known, or even unpublished in historic and contemporary terms. They are
precise choices, whose synthesis outlines structural points in the chromatic question, like
the relationship with nature, with politics or its vigorous cultural diversity, the reason that
MAR has brought the painting Abaporu (1928), by Tarsila do Amaral, to Rio de Janeiro, an
emblematic work from the Brazilian Anthropophagic Movement. There are also equally
fundamental presences – such as masterpieces by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall,
Carybé, Ismael Nery –, which constitute a fabric of artistic excellency that salutes Olympic
Rio.
With special pleasure, MAR receives its public for A cor do Brasil, noting that given
previously agreed commitments, some artworks will only remain for the duration of the Rio
2016 Olympic Games, and the third room of the exhibition – dedicated to the turn of the
20th to 21st century – will remain on show only until October. The articulation that made
the uniting of these works possible, the result of much research and generosity, led by Paulo
Herkenhoff, was only made possible thanks to the immeasurable collaboration of
institutions, collectors and artists from all over Brazil and other countries. To one and all of
them, our sincere gratitude.
Carlos Gradim
Director-president of Instituto Odeon
Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR
There is no neutral colour. As well as being an optical phenomenon, colour is a social
construction. And as it acts in the field of sensitivity, it also acts politically. As such, from the
experimentation of forms of perception to the public dimension of colour, colouring has
never been a naive, apolitical, or an arbitrary act. There are many projects of colour in
society.
The exhibition A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] presents the inflections and
transformations of colour in the history of Brazilian art. Starting from the dramatic colour
projects of Baroque, the chromatic pallet of nature of the travelling painters from the 17th19th centuries, and from French-like academic investigations, the exhibition opens a wide
panorama for modern experimentations relating to colour in the 20th century. Works by
such important artists as Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Flávio de Carvalho, Emiliano Di
Cavalcanti, Ismael Nery, Lasar Segall, Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Candido Portinari form
a vibrant journey through the historical moment in which Brazil invented itself as a nation,
from the plethora of colours of the Brazilwood tree, in which colour takes on a crucial role.
Moving on, the second room of the exhibition shows the period in which the disconnection
of colour from its nationalist dimension was sought, in order to radicalise experiments that
were, as a priority, perceptive, and linked to the autonomy of art. It is the environment both
of the Bernardelli Group, with the first exercises into abstract, as well as the constructive
affirmation of Brazil, with the concrete and neo-concrete movements, from which the
masterpieces of artists who remain little-known to the public stand out here, such as Décio
Vieira, Aluísio Carvão and Ivan Serpa.
The last room of the exhibition sets off from the abstract Japanese gesticularity of artists
like Manabu Mabe, Flávio-Shiró and Tomie Ohtake, and leads the visitor to the
voluptuousness of the gesticular colour of the 80s generation, whose research into painting
made up a unique phase of art in the country. Reaching the 21st century, the colour of Brazil
returns to the implications and political projects of colour in the present, now considering
an expanded Brazil, from North to South, the example of a nucleus dedicated to the revision
of the idea of a "national", which has the flag as its greatest icon.
Multiple intentions and resonances of colour are revealed through art: colour invents a
nation; it transforms it into a republic; it recreates – through the landscape – the
relationship of man with nature, with the earth, with minerals, with the sky, and with the
clouds; it interposes science and art; it promotes meetings between distinct cultures, forms
of colouring the body, and the political affirmation between colour and ethnicity; it
repositions the body; it acts politically; and it symbolises. It constantly recreates means of
perception, even in the absence of colour, or in projects of “inexistent colour” (Israel
Pedrosa).
What is imperative in A cor do Brasil is the strength of art from one of its essential, and
therefore fundamental gestures: the invention of colour.
Paulo Herkenhoff and Marcelo Campos
Curators
Colour, life, struggle and resistance
The socio-political experiences that underlie Anna Maria Maiolino's severe colour project
are crossed by the trauma of private hardships that arise from the Second World War, and
by a history of migrations. Her reduced group of colours builds the visual forcefulness that
investigates the place of the wandering subject in the modern world, the fluid roles of the
woman, the significant moments of art in society, the primal matter of the world, bread,
desire, love, fear and anthropophagic hunger. Her Mapa mentais [Mental maps] give an
account of a personal itinerary that finds refuge only in the exposure of homelessness. The
sanguine red that crosses her work is the sufficiency of the vital colour that solves the
extremes of the absolute absence of light in the darkness, or the blinding luminosity. For
Anna Maria, talking about oneself affirms that every individual has their own inventory of
losses, folds in the soul, vibrant body memories, belongings. For her, a place is the space
where subjectivity can exist, in search of the painful fullness of expression. It is from this
broad cartography between struggle and resistance that the positivity of this work on the
happiness and pain of living comes from.
Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc]
The act of Waltercio Caldas is simple: covering a book on Matisse, the artist of sensual and
vibrant colours, with talcum powder. But its meaning is complex. Matisse com talco
[Matisse with talc] refers to the history of science and modern art, and to the disc that was
created by the physicist Isaac Newton, a circle painted with the seven colours present in
sunlight (those of the rainbow). When Newton’s disc is set in motion, the colours overlap in
our eye (on the retina) and we get the sensation of a mixture. With speed, comes the
illusion of the set of colours turning grey or white.
Matisse com talco shows how our eye works in its astonishment. The work discusses the
search for the zero degree of Suprematism painting by Malevich, the artist who painted
white on white in search of the primordial light of the world, and the primal moment of the
white canvas before painting.
Waltercio’s work allows us to mention A estética da vida [The aesthetic of life] (1921), by
Graça Aranha, which constituted a breviary of modern colour in Brazil, by proposing that
artists convert light into colour. In a broad sense, Matisse com talco is the emblem that
signifies A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] itself, because it is the key-work that results in
the imaginary hypothesis of combining all the colours of the exhibition.
The Bernardelli Group
In 1931, as opposition to the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, there were two masters of
artistic training: Alberto da Veiga Guignard, at Pró-Arte, and Bruno Lechowski, from the
Bernardelli Group. The latter brought together artists from the middle classes, or those with
little resources, in a new, social scope of modernism – Bráulio Poiava, Edson Motta, Eugênio
Sigaud, Joaquim Tenreiro, Quirino Campofiorito, José Pancetti, Milton Dacosta, Manoel
Santiago and others. There they discussed the relationship between painting and nature,
and material and language in the assembling of a painting. Lechowski absorbed notions of
formism from the Polish painter Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939), such as the autonomy of
art, the definition of the painting by the empirical reality of its material, and the flatness of
the canvas. His colours are located between the sunsets and solar stridencies relating to the
chromatic agenda of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) and the answers to
the tropics. A painting by Lechowski is, above all, a text of the matter.
In Dacosta, the constructive lessons, the cubist deformations and the balance of the
colouristic plans are precocious concerns (Mário Pedrosa). Pancetti "doesn't document
anything" (Ruben Navarra). "Who I owe most to is the painter Bruno Lechowski, who was
interested in me and helped me with his words of advice" (Pancetti). Lechowski taught the
sailor to paint his own sea, to produce a personal sea. In Pancetti, what prevails is the
synthesis, the economy, the notion of structure in sombre colours, the leaden sea, the end
for the disembarking sailor. In the Bernardelli Group, Pancetti and Dacosta looked for
painting, and no longer a Brazil (Carlos Zilio). In Anita e natureza-morta de livros, frutas e
jarro com girassóis [Anita and the still-life of books, fruit and jar with sunflower], the model
looks at the spectator with a fixed gaze. The sunflower stares at the spectator like an extra
eye that reinforces the discussion over the gaze. The painter's optical space allows him to
measure distances and intervals in his universe, composed of two painted canvases, a
landscape and a portrait, his fundamental subjects. The fruit is arranged as a still-life of fruit
and a book by publisher José Olympio. The model’s gaze to the Other as the only possibility
of escaping closure.
The painters of Maurício de Nassau
To recognise the territory and the economic potential of Brazil, the Company of the West
Indies, led by Maurício de Nassau from 1636, brought together scientists and artists, a
unique group in the Americas. Landscaper Frans Post (1612-1680) stands out in the
registration of the physical and social environment of life in the colony. Albert Eckhout
(1610-1665) is a more anthropologic artist of an ethnic background, even representing
indians and cannibalism. Gillis Peeters (1612-1653), a precocious cartographic painter, also
created tropical fantasies. Prosperity in Holland united trade, knowledge and art in the
period known as the Golden Century, with painters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. A
sombre baroque prevailed, with no taste for the splendour of production from Italy and
Flanders.
On returning to Holland, Post continued producing variations of his Brazilian landscapes,
starting from sketches and adding elements of exotic fantasy and bright colours. Certain
sombre aspects refer to the Dutch tonal landscapes. The horizon has more attention, with
bluish atmospheric perspective. The landscape becomes flatter like the geography of
Holland. The painting features enormous notable details like the vegetation and rare
animals that populate the scene - Post had met the German naturalist George Marcgraf,
who had also been to Brazil. Some of his colours changed with time. Post notes the sugar
cane mill, the house fronts, the chapel. It is Sunday, the colonial settlers appear to go to
church, while on their day off established by Nassau, slaves are shown at a party.
Colours of the earth
The pigments of the ground, used initially as a pictorial material available in the colony by
Mestre Ataíde, are converted into a potent mark of Brazilianess in their own modern
pictorial sign. This is a singular aspect of Brazilian art. The soil, loaded with oxides and other
minerals, has offered a model of red for generations of artists, and the material iron for the
raw steel (corten) sculpture of Amilcar de Castro. Frans Krajcberg is the most solid founder
of this vision, having travelled, above all, to Minas Gerais looking for minerals. Alberto da
Veiga Guignard, Alfredo Volpi, Arthur Luiz Piza, Manfredo de Souzanetto, Katie van
Scherpenberg, Carlos Vergara, Niura Bellavinha, Sandra Gamarra (on the Mariana mud) and
others, are among the artists who have contributed to the greatest density of this identity
project beyond the light-colour, the colour of the countryside, or tropicalism.
The invention of the ancestral colour
Vicente do Rego Monetiro opens the Brazilian modernist project of colour starting from his
studies of Amazonian archaeology at the Museu Nacional in the 1910s. The conceptual base
of his colour system incorporates the plastic values of Amazonian archaeology, such as
palette, volume, form and the reduction of figure. The colours evoke the baked earth and
engobe painting. The figures have willing volumetry in ceramic reliefs. The anatomic code,
defined based on pre-Cabral pieces, allows us to retrace the body in Mulher sentada [Sitting
woman] (1924) as the structure of a marajoara vase. If to Hegel the jungle was a space
outside of history, to Rego Monteiro it would be the only possibility for composing an
indigenous history, prior to colonisation, for the political project of cultural emancipation.
The invention of Rio
Painting in colonial Brazil was scarce, and low quality, worth it for the iconography.
Landscape was discouraged for fear that it could facilitate greed in enemy powers. With the
economic progress of Bahia and Minas Gerais in the 18th century, a few painters appeared
from the region, mostly in religious art, such as José Teófilo de Jesus and Mestre Ataíde.
The Escola Fluminense de Pintura consisted of Frei Ricardo do Pilar and, in the 18th century,
Raimundo da Costa e Silva, Manuel Dias de Oliveira and others. In Rio, capital of the viceroyalty, art of a civil nature is outlined in paintings rich in details of day-to-day life, and of
notable facts and days of celebration. The greatest legacy of Francisco Muzzi is the pair
about the Incêndio do Recolhimento de Nossa Senhora do Parto [Fire of the Gathering of
Our Lady of the Birth] and its Reconstrução [Reconstruction] (1789), with good
documentation of fire-fighting, architecture and engineering in the city.
The elliptic paintings of Leandro Joaquim invent Rio in order to adorn a pavilion in the
Passeio Público park. There are many compelling visual narratives of colonial Brazil:
Procissão marítima [Maritime Procession], Pesca da baleia na baía de Guanabara [Whale
hunting in Guanabara Bay], Vista da Igreja e Praia da Glória [View of Glória Church and
Beach], Vista da lagoa do Boqueirão e do aqueduto de Santa Tereza [View of the Boqueirao
Lagoon and the Santa Tereza aqueduct], Revista militar no Largo do Paço [Military march in
Paço Square] and Visita de uma esquadra inglesa na baía de Guanabara [Visit of a British
squadron to Guanabara Bay]. The bright chromatic contrasts, the luminosity, and the
documentation of daily life, economic activities, aspects of the city, and carelessness in the
representation of the mountains, all contribute to a graciousness in the set of works, which
is the most abundant pictorial document of life in the capital of the colony and, above all,
expresses the need for a symbolic representation of the city.
Little red feathered headdress, white beads, brown in a reddish way, headdress with yellow
feathers, a brown parrot, chequered colours, black paint, modes of blue, and other coloured
chequers, red hoods, red caps, yellow feathered caps, others, in red, and others in greens,
the dye was red, black dye, green stone, red cap, green leave huts, bird feather bonnets, of
the green kind and of the yellow kind, green sea urchins, little red grains, red parrots, very
red and well formed, and two small green ones and green feather hoods, and a cloth of
feathers of many colours, red wax.
What is the colour of Brazil?
A colour of Brazil does not exist. A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] proposes transversal
histories by sets and masterpieces, or individuals with the capacity of meanings of
aesthetical dimensions, through samples and cuts. With the explosion of art in the country
in the 1960s, the necessary focus is returned to the colour of Rio. Far from defining the best,
this exhibition organises a collective writing on the colour of Brazil, taken in a trans-historic
and trans-territorial format, in a vision that indicates hypotheses, among so many others. If
the possibilities of colour in the colony reflect the availability of pigments, we can
understand the theories and the experiences of colour, laid out in Brazil as a pathos that is
baroque, neoclassical, the light-colour of the sublime, the wisdom and lightness in Eliseu
Visconti, colour that is modern before modernism, anatomic transgressions of the colour of
complexion, the black sun of melancholy, the tripod of A estética da vida [The aesthetic of
life], Matavirgism, Brazilwood and anthropophagy, colour-with-the-smell-of-fruit, all the
colours of Carnival, the colour of the countryside, naive colour, vernacular taste, concretist
canon, neo-concrete invention, the devouring of Mondrian, supra-sensorial and plurisensorial Tropicalia, cerne-colour, popcrete colour, Volpi simply Volpi, torrid colour,
Newton’s disk in Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc], blinded by the light, infra-sensorial,
colour strike, visceral, dirty colour, the earthy colour of natural pigments and anilines,
monochromes, political struggle, monetary colour, witnessed violence, live mud, body
painting, neo-baroque, pollution, new objectivity, O rei do mau gosto [The King of bad
taste], colour-concept, seduction, subjectivity of colour, cotton nylon stocking, postproduction, Japanese colour, struggle, the colour emblematic of football and parties, kitsch,
armorial agenda, real vigour, chromatic farofa, Amazonian visuality, Afro-Brazilian colour,
symbolic indigenous universes, Brazilian riskiness, colour of signs, official colours, colour of
industrial things, citationism, political colour, non-existent colour, Desvio para o vermelho
[Detour to red], the taste of blue, swellings of rumours of language, the colour of the
donkey when it flees.
The Anthropophagic woman
Her master, Fernand Léger, recommended the contrast between shapes and the local
colour, decisive bases for the decision of Tarsila do Amaral to “paint in Brazilian”. In Carnival
of 1924, Tarsila and Oswald de Andrade visited Rio, where he launched the Manifesto da
poesia pau-brasil [Manifesto of Brazilwood poetry] (“The saffron shacks and ocher greens of
the favela under the cabralian blue are aesthetic facts”). She painted the pictures Morro da
Favela [Favela Hill] (Providência Hill), Carnaval em Madureira [Carnival in Madureira] and
Palmeiras [Palm trees]. Her palette developed based on the vibrations of the party, of the
vernacular colours of the shacks and the miner's prayers. The palms transformed into a
stylem, a unit of style.
The social formation of Brazil is a process of meetings between cultures. In A estética da
vida [The aesthetic of life] (1921), Graça Aranha mounts a support on which Brazilian culture
would be supported: The Portuguese melancholy, the “African childishness” - the saffron
shacks and the ocher in the greens of the favela under the Cabralian sky are aesthetic facts
(“cosmic terror”) – and the “metaphysics of terror” of the indians (filling the spaces
between the human spirit and nature with ghosts). Oswald de Andrade takes up this theory
of Brazil in the Manifesto antropófago [Anthropophagic manifesto] (1928), which proclaims:
“Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically”. Starting with the
painting Antropofagia [Anthropophagy], she points to cannibalism, because “antropos”
means humans and “fagia”, to eat. In art, cultural exchange between societies is designated
the act of feeding from the culture of the other to form your own. “I’m only interested in
what is not mine. The law of man. The law of Anthropophagy.” The painting Abaporu (1928),
which means “the man that eats people” in the Tupi-Guarani language, gives origin to her
anthropophagic production, which implies the idea of communion with nature, ghostly
forms, cultural exchanges, vast metaphysical spaces, the nocturnal atmosphere of dreams
like in Surrealism, restlessness and mystery. Her flowers have a connotation of devouring
and erotic desire. After anthropophagy, Tarsila will have social concerns.
Nature and history
The agenda of Brazilian art is modernised with the installation of the Portuguese court in
the country and the contraction of the French Artistic Mission. There appeared landscapes,
portraits, still-lifes, paintings of history, sacred art, art for the State, scenography, and
scenes of civil life.
The first still-lifes with Brazilian fruit are by Albert Eckhout, a Nassau painter. In Holland,
still-life had the moral value of vanitas, which affirmed the transitory nature of beauty, art,
knowledge and of the power in front of death to unite fruit, animals, art, books, jewels,
tools and symbols of power. In Brazil, still-life celebrated bountiful tropical exuberance, with
Reis de Carvalho, the sumptuous flowers of Agostinho da Motta, the abundant Estêvão
Silva, and Francisca Manoela Valadão, who united fruits, greens, vegetables, animals and
gained slaves.
Silva exhibited the still-lifes on walls of fabric, behind which he left pieces of fruit that give
off a smell to articulate both vision and nose, a more abstract meaning, in the
phenomenology experience of the senses. An Afro-descendent, he refused honours in
protest against slavery, constituting a model of resistance art.
The painting of history arose in Brazil with allegories and the registers by Debret to the
service of the court. Its uptake resulted in the monumental machines Batalha do Avaí
[Battle of Avaí], by Pedro Américo, and Batalha dos Guararapes [Battle of Guararapes], by
Victor Meireles, shown as the mark of the foundation of nationality with the defeat of the
Dutch by the Portuguese, indians and Africans. Pedro Américo painted Independência ou
morte [Independence or death], an official work for the governor of the province of São
Paulo, already in the political construction of its symbolic hegemony. A positivist and
republican, he is a friend of Pedro II – hence the grandiloquent scene of Tiradentes
esquartejado [Tiradentes quartered] (1893), sentenced by Mary I, the great-grandmother of
the Emperor, only to be painted after his death and the proclamation of the republic. The
dramatic scene of the martyr of independence, inspired by Géricault, conforms to the map
of Brazil with its members in pieces.
Modern women
At the start of the 20th century, modern women came forward who broke with patriarchy in
art: Nair de Teffé, Anna and Maria Vasco and Anita Malfatti. The seascapes by sisters Anna
and Maria Vasco built the time with the fluid material of the watercolour and the surface,
with free gestures that revealed the conscience of the plastic-abstract values of brush
strokes. The transgressive Nair de Teffé, pioneer of automobile driving, is an ironic
caricature. Married to president Hermes da Fonseca, she introduced the guitar and the
music of Chiquinha Gonzaga at the Catete Palace, in a rupture of social standards.
Anita Malfatti studied in Berlin and New York. The teaching methods of her professor,
Homer Boss, included a boat trip on the choppy coastline around Maine. Back on land, the
students painted. Anita responded to the shaking of the excursion with nervous brush
strokes that destabilised the surface in waves, winds and rocks. In portraits, the
construction of subject went on to be performed with vigorous brush strokes and the
absence of design. Strident colour accentuates the psychology of the characters and betrays
the anatomy, like in O homem amarelo [The yellow man]. The poet Oswald de Andrade
called her “Anita Malfeita” (Anita badly done) and she herself recognised: “I am Malfatti,
which in Italian means badly done. But I have the talent to overcome this.” It is difficult to
exhibit in Brazil. Monteiro Lobato makes a scathing critique, “Paranoia or mystification?”: or
that expressionist painting is the art of a crazy person or the scribbling of a child. The writer
articulates three forms of limited capacity in the new Brazilian Civil Code against Anita: the
woman, the crazy person, and the child. The trigger and martyr of modernism, Anita is, to
Mário de Andrade, the revelation of the new and the conviction of the revolution. Anita
provoked symptoms of social intolerance in the modern.
Alberto da Veiga Guignard
Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s interest in nature arose from the low-lying vegetation of the
Botanical Garden in Rio and grew to include groups of upright trees. The vegetation of the
Atlantic Rainforest, which João Baptista da Costa worked on with intricacies of greens in the
sunlight and the shade, taught the artist a lot.
Trans-cultural construction in Guignard’s landscapes: Chineseries, Japanism, the tradition of
the atmospheric European painting of German painter Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), the
solarity of Grünewald, the capriccio, an angel by Rembrandt, and the romantic vision of the
cosmos of Humboldt, from popular painting of Brazil.
The sublime in the painting emerges unexpectedly from the traffic of the minerality of rock
to water, of granite to cloud. Guignard deals with the black person as subjectivity and the
agent of history, not as folklore, but as the work ethos of the black person in Brazil. His
spatial imagination of abysses and skies visited the unlimited. His Noite de São João [São
João Night] eliminates the mesh and arms the fluency of an endless fall or an incalculable
ascent, because from there he searched for the edges of the universe. Guignard asks for our
doubt: is this mountain really sky?
Alberto da Veiga Guignard
Stories of trees. The 1st Brazilian Conference for the Protection of Nature, held in Rio in
1934, must have touched Alberto da Veiga Guignard, because in this period he deepened his
interest in the live nature in gardens: the vegetation in the tufts, the lake of giant lilies and
pool of lily pads at the Botanical Gardens in Rio are from this period. Later come
homogenous clusters of vertical trees of the same species (Bambuzal) and gardens in frontal
and elevated views. João Baptista da Costa was the informal master of Guignard for the
chromatic value of the lightness of vegetation. The vegetation of the Atlantic rainforest is
worked on in the painting by Baptista da Costa with careful use of greens in relation to the
sources of light, shadows and the translucence of the leaves.
Stories of mountains. From the oldest bodies in the world (600 million years old),
Guignard’s Serra do Mar mountain range is the age of the Earth as a locus of the evocation
of colonial history, and of a time in suspension. The whistle of the locomotive in Paisagem
imaginária [Imaginary landscape] can only be the Trenzinho caipira [Little countryside train]
of Heitor Villa-Lobos. The mountain is Guignard’s Angelus Novus, Paul Klee’s image that was
taken by Walter Benjamin as an emblem of history: the impotence in relation to the past
and the way that we are propelled to the future. The sublime emerges unexpectedly from
the traffic of the minerality of rock to water, from granite to cloud. The most solid, in
geologic convulsion on the surface of the landscape, are bodies of water. The oil paint, thin
and fast like watercolour, protagonises the depth of tectonic revolutions in the shallows of
the surface as an uprising from the abyss for the settlement of the visible.
Stories of black people. Guignard deals with the black person as subjectivity and an agent of
history, far away from the folklore of Mário de Andrade. There is a sweaty black man, the
humidity of the face is the political vestige of the energy spent at work. Against the
lecherous paradigm of colonial debauchery, the painter drew the affectionate ties of Afrodescendent families. A execução de Tiradentes [The execution of Tiradentes] presents the
cycle of extraction and exportation of gold, from the mines to the port and the progressive
enrichment of the intermediaries and the oppression of the slave. His post-colonial vision
shows the marks of slavery in modern Brazil, the contradictions and the added value.
Violence is in the scenes of the Passion, because the flogged Christ of Guignard is the slave
on the pillory post. In a view of Ouro Preto, Guignard creates a fictional portrait of
Aleijadinho, showing his work and imagining his personality to proclaim the Afrodescendent pillar of Brazilian culture. Guignard, like Lasar Segall, projected the work ethos
of the black person in Brazil.
Stories of clouds and fluctuations. Guignard’s spatial imagination for abysses and skies
visited the unlimited. His Paisagens imaginárias [Imaginary landscapes] eliminated the mesh
and armed the fluency of an endless fall, or an incalculable assent, because from there they
searched for the edges of the universe. Guignard asks for our doubts: is this mountain
actually mist? This is painting and materiality, not to be confused with ethereal mass. The
rock is there – for millions of years – but they are landscapes in a state of transience, they
float like a memory and a story, but they approach the moment.
Stories of exchanges. Guignard’s transcultural construction of the landscapes: China-ism,
Japanism the atmospheric perspective of the European Renaissance. quotes from van Eyck
in Ghent, of the Battle of Alexandre in Issus by Albrecht Altdorfer, the solidarity of
Grünewald, the Leonardoesque sfumato, the capriccio, an angel by Rembrandt and the
romantic vision of the cosmos of Humboldt. Indians populate Cristo em baldaquim [Christ in
baldachin] and a black Christ emerges in indices of anthropophagy. It is as if, in Guignard,
the world was a face of Brazil.
Three eruditions
Katie van Scherpenberg and José Maria Dias da Cruz proposed an erudite discussion on
colour at the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage in the 1980s, where Cristina Canale
studied.
For Katie van Scherpenberg, landscape was the device to re-problemise colour. An oxidised
landscape by the German painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880) in her parents' home
offered the mineral tone, which impregnated her dry landscapes of solvent-free pigments.
In the exhibition Rio vermelho [Red Rio] (1983), the gallery is painted in red and houses
paintings in the same colour, with green traces. Jardim vermelho [Red garden] covers the
lawn with red soil/iron oxide. Under the furtivity of the germination and photosynthesis, the
fluorescent painting, because the garden is alive, and it responds to the invigorating force of
the light-energy. The red territory is repainted with green grass. The painter alludes to the
death of the painting: “death is something material and the painting, because it is a visual
thought, produces memories, discussions, history, culture and roots”.
The work of José Maria Dias da Cruz forks at the theory of colour (through the legibility of
the chromatic construction of the pictorial surface) and image (even in its historic cut).
Despite his verbal discourse on painting, the artist’s colour is not the pure philosophical
concept of Wittgenstein, but a sensorial erudition in his own key. His mark is the sensitive
knowledge that passed from Goethe and others to Cézanne, before landing, in a personal
language, on the visible surface.
Cristina Canale's painting, however hesitant it may seem, is more decided in form and
colour. The artist is capable of displacing intuitions, the libertarian improvisations and
density of studies at Parque Lage, for high academic debates of German painting in
Düsseldorf. After this experience between systems of training, her work built a sensorial
freshness, a lightness of colour, an apparent ambulation of the contour of forms between
the ambivalences of the formless and enunciation of references, the lack of loquacity to
inquire about what Entre o ser e as coisas [Between beings and things] has, if not the poetic
rumour of language.
Erudition and the experimental in two teachers
Katie van Scherpenberg and José Maria Dias da Cruz proposed an erudite discussion about
colour at the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage in the 1980s. For her, landscape is the
tool to re-problemise colour. An oxidised canvas by the German painter Anselm Feurbach
(1829-1880) offered the mineral tone that impregnated her dry solvent-free pigment
landscapes. In the exhibition Rio vermelho [Red river] (1983), the gallery is painted in red
and houses paintings in the same colour, with green traces. The painter alludes to the life
and death of the painting: “death is something material and the painting, because it is a
visual thought, produces memories, discussions, history, culture and roots”. The work of
Dias da Cruz forks at the theory of colour (through the legibility of the chromatic
construction of the pictorial surface) and image (even in its historical cut). Despite his verbal
discourse on painting, the colour of the artist is not the pure philosophical concept of
Wittgenstein, but a sensorial erudition in his own key. Its poetic is the sensitive knowledge
that passed from Goethe and others to Cézanne, until landing, in a personal language, on
the visible surface.
Jorge Guinle
When painting regained its prestige at the start of the 1980s, Jorge Guinle (1947-1987)
emerged as a vigorous artist, alongside Flavio-Shiró and Iberê Camargo. Older than his
fellow beginners, who rocked the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage, Guinle was a
generous and available reference as a mature painter. Discreet, he never believed in heroes
in art, because his energy was the painting itself. With him, the colour of Brazil emancipated
from rational concepts and comments about reality. Only the axis of colour/painting is real
in the gaze that he built. His work was a sun in the moment of the political opening after the
military dictatorship.
Afro-Brazil
The slavery of Africans marks the violent history of the founding of Brazil, with
consequences nowadays. How could one escape from the status of homo sacer? A subject
outside the field of effective legal protection, like the slave was. The experience of
banishment from Africa in the Americas was a time of fractures with no return (Saúl Karsz).
The re-composition of the socio-cultural system, like in Palmares, and religious and cultural
manifestations were forms of resistance in exile. African music crossed Brazil, from the
excellency of Father José Mauricio Nunes Garcia, master of Capela Real, to Pixinguinha, a
fundamental figure in popular music. Machado de Assis, the great Brazilian writer, Cruz e
Souza or Lima Barreto, modern even before modernism, point to the formation of Brazil
through a discourse of the subject outside the structure of the domination of slavery.
According to Germain Bazain, Aleijadinho was the greatest sculptor in the Americas in the
colonial period. A carver and urbanist, Mestre Valentim introduced great changes to the Rio
of the vice-royalty. In the empire and in the republic, black artists imposed themselves on
every vicissitude: Estêvão Silva, the Timótheo da Costa brothers, and Di Cavalcanti, nephew
of abolitionist José do Patrocínio. In the post-war period, the rigorous concretist Almir
Mavignier graduated in Ulm, Germany, with Max Bill.
The constructive Rubem Valentim proposed a Brazilian riskiness, a writing that converted
the symbology of the Orisha gods of Candomblé, and the risked points of the Umbanda
religion, into significant plastic spiritual values. His historic task was to deconstruct the
relegation that surrounded the symbolic representation of black people, in which their
religious forms were treated as a matter for the police, superstition, folklore and pure
ethnological objects. Emanoel Araújo appeared close to Caetano Veloso and Maria
Bethânia, his contemporaries from Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia. The artist’s refined
constructive woodcuts bloomed in dialogue with the then contemporary Africa, under the
impact of a visit that he made to the continent. His Africa Suite operates a material
economy of colour, with the fracture of the objective form written by symbolic colour and
the semantic infiltration of Iorubá culture. If for Manuel Messias, another black artist, the
resultant wood is the soul, for Araújo it is the body, the trauma in folds of domination.
Other black artists to mention are: Milton Ribeiro, Heitor dos Prazeres, Arthur Bispo do
Rosário, Mestre Didi, Raimundo de Oliveira, Walter Firmo, M. L. Magliani, Jayme Fygura,
Rosana Paulino, Jaime Lauriano, Paulo Nazareth, Ayrson Heráclito, Arjan Martins and Helô
Sanvoy.
Brasilia, colourless memory
What is the memory of colour in a new city? During the period of Juscelino Kubitschek’s
government (1956-1961), when Brasilia was built, painting had very little iconographic
meaning in the country. The prevalent photography was in black and white, colour photos
faded and the quality of reproduction in the press was low. The red dust of the treeless
plains was impregnated in the asphalt and the white marble of the buildings. The invention
of Brasilia, in its passing from black and white to colour, confronted photographs with a
painting by Milton Ribeiro, a student of Guignard and an artistic Candango, a pioneer of
artistic teaching in Novacap, at the Universidade de Brasília, founded by Anísio Teixeira,
Darcy Ribeiro and others.
The multiple and the multiplier
He was a man dedicated to diversifying his practices - that which was to some people a
stylistic instability, was experienced by Ivan Serpa as a evasion of the styling, that turned an
artwork into a product wrapped in a style that was desired by the consumer. Serpa gave
himself the right to be an artist in his own style: eclectic and varied, but focussed, and never
amateur; experimental and demanding, intense and perfectionist. He lived back and forth
between the mesh of modernity and the revocation by the political ghosts of the Black
phase - the horror! The horror! - and erotics. The absence of colour compounded the
mourning, exposing the imaginary of the terrorism of the State. He considered green
ecology in Amazonia, green and pink in Mangueira. The fluid trace escaped into nervous
scribbles that were incorporated in vibrant and warm colours of desire. Serpa attached
transparencies, reframed letters, organised beetle holes, disconcerted rhythmic harmony
colours, moved circles, freed animals and humans, risked semantic leaps. He even used
brown! – Waldemar Cordeiro accused him of violating the concretist law of restricting
colours to the primaries and secondaries. He was generous, a professor of a unique art,
because among his students were Aluísio Carvão, Décio Vieira, João José da Costa, Rubem
Ludolf, César e Hélio Oiticica, Evany Fanzeres, Waltercio Caldas, Paulo Garcez, Emil Forman,
Ana Vitória Mussi and others. On Sundays, he would open up his home in Méier to other
artists for discussions about art. He was demanding. He expected a lot of production from
his students between one class and the next, as must have been the case with Hélio
Oiticica’s Metaesquemas series. He wanted an intensity from the young artist until there
was a confluence from a single decision in the brain, from a sensitive perception, of the will
for language and the body itself.
Lasar Segall
Lasar Segall was the painter of ethos. Everything was based on the ethical density of solid
artwork. His paintings Kaddish and Os eternos caminhantes [The eternal walkers] deal with
eschatology (the final destination of things), losses, the diaspora, the pogroms. Sombre and
vigorously melancholic paintings – it was imperative to light up the hopelessness – they
were doomed to execration by Reich as degenerate art. An immigrant, Segall bid farewell to
his ex-wife, representing himself as a mulatto to symbolise his adoption of Brazil. He painted
black people toiling in the fields, organising nature through their work. He affirmed the
work-ethic of Afro-descendants. Madonna lives in a favela, Morro vermelho [Red hill], which
has the shape of the bow of Navio de emigrantes [Emigrant ship]; two situations from the
ethics of hope – exclusion and the refuge where slavery did riches. Segall now articulates
social exclusion and Holocaust. To him, it has been said, Jews and Black people are races in
diaspora. And his painting never stays silent.
Livro da criação [The book of creation]
“’What is the meaning of a book’, thought Alice, 'without images or dialogues?’” Without
words, Livro da criação [The book of creation] by Lygia Pape is the post-book in 14 pages: “I
put my meanings in a significant-base (the form of the page) that at the same time both
guide my feelings and become enriched with them”. The water comes from semi-circular
cuts that mark the start of the world as the history of man, the geometry: 1. After the
waters got lower, lower, lower and lower.
Livro da criação [The book of creation] and Genesis by Mira Schendel oppose the non-verbal
with the verbal, history and Sacred Scriptures, immanence and transcendence, materialism
and metaphysics. In Livro da criação [The book of creation], when light is made, colour is
invented. 2. The man started to mark the time. The route of the stars is the time of the
mechanics of the cosmos. The subject and their consciousness of time: life and death. Homo
sapiens appear. 3. Man discovered fire. Science is born. 4. Man was a nomad hunter.
Technique is born. 5. In the forest. The language is the forest of signs.
To Ferreira Gullar, “the name of things is under the things”; in Lygia Pape, they get rid of the
name. 6. Man was gregarious and sowed the land. The metaphor of art as a trajectory of
light and sowing. The cubist mesh sows the colour into space and the emptiness into the
being. 7. And the land flowers. The harvest blooms neo-concretist colours in garden state
(Clarice Lispector). 8. Man invented the wheel. Enhancing the body. 9. Man discovered the
planetary system. To be in the world is to be understood in the universe because 10. The
earth was round and rotated on its own axis. The notion of the cosmos. 11. Keel navigates in
time. The diaspora. 12. Stilt House. Le Corbusier. It is the fold of the primal shelter. The stilt
house is the stilt of the modern architecture of Le Corbusier. 13. Submarine – The hollow is
full under the water. Submarine. The hollow is full under the water. It is the boat without
Moby Dick, but with Joyce. It is war. 14. Light. Synthesis of the work by Lygia Pape herself.
The book without verb, circular time in the squareness of the circle, infinite.
Concretism. The basis for concretism in São Paulo, the Manifesto Ruptura [Ruptured
Manifesto] (1952), advocated the pre-viewable of the “pure visuality” of the German
philosopher Konrad Fiedler and Theo Van Doesburg's Art Concrete Manifesto (1930). The
concretism of Waldemar Cordeiro imposed the objectivity of geometry, control of material
(the elimination of every trace of the brush, like in industrial aesthetics), and the art of
signs, a restricted colour program (primaries and secondaries). Mário Pedrosa called the
concretist painter a painting machine and Décio Pignatari lamented at not incorporating
chance. Despite the canon, differences erupted. “A change was taking place in society”, says
Judith Lauand, an artist of the semantic dispersion of colour on fabric. Hermelindo
Fiaminghi fought to escape the weight of Max Bill until he understood the potential of
reticulated graphical colour and the idea of light-colour. Rigorous, Alexandre Wollner was
confronted between designer and graphic painter. The clumsy scale of Lothar Charoux and
Maurício Nogueira Lima matures in the Lexicon Op of the reduction of colour to graphic
contrast. Cosmopolitan, Geraldo de Barros was always experimental. His Fotoformas
[Photoforms] are an epistemological cut of photography as knowledge. His painting
articulated the visual games of gestalt that renewed interrogations of the gaze, like in the
pair of paintings in which the weight of primary colours differs in the circles and the
squares, despite identical structures. Luiz Sacilotto, experimental in a form articulated by
colour, opens up for materials and reliefs – challenging the surface stabilised by crises. In
Waldemar Cordeiro, the painted geometry evolves to the concept of the visible idea, the
productive relationship between art and the philosophy of Fiedler, with reduced focus on
the affective and symbolic dimensions of colour. Reviewing it considers light and the
computer. A Gramscian utoptista, Cordeiro confronts the contradiction of appreciating pop,
despite symbolising capitalism. His answer is the popcreto. In the current world, he affirms,
“The methods of production and communication should be the same for everyone,
everywhere”.
Light-objects. The work of art, understood as an autonomous object, overcomes the
condition of category (from painting to sculpture) in approximation to these works. In
Abraham Palatnik’s object, the work is a machine that explores the impalpable of the light,
crossing its definition in physics and unfolding into movements of colour-light. It is a
worldwide pioneer of kinetic art (from the Greek kinesis, movement). The projected
movements appear to dissolve and shuffle the separation of the colours of the rainbow and,
even in its slowness, it alludes to the speed of light, a cosmic measurement of distance.
The painting of Almir Mavignier results from a method: paint is spread directly from its tube
to leave small circles of colour. The junction of these circles and the control of colour
produce images, such as the crosshairs of the printing of photographs in certain moments of
industrial graphics. Here, this accumulation surprises through the analytic unfolding of the
spectrum of light.
To Waldemar Cordeiro, the exhaustion of geometric art led the artist to the challenge of
structuring the spectrum of light in the form of meshes, like a chessboard of colours in
painting. The compliment, in Brazilian art, is the neo-concrete words of Osmar Dillon, in
which light is the material of the signifier, like in the writing of the word Colour, the act of
Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc], by Waltercio Caldas, and Desvio para o vermelho
[Detour to red], by Cildo Meireles.
Abstraction: Iberê and his master
The pioneer in the practice of non-figurative art in Brazil was Manoel Santiago, with
paintings linked to theosophy, like O pensamento de Deus no absoluto [The thought of God
in the absolute] (1920). Antonio Bandeira was an experimental abstract. His methods
investigated supports (straw, polystyrene, biscuit), runoff and ink stamps, as traces of the
remains of the world in the abstract image, a semantic clash between significant and
signified.
In the 1950s, a generation of Japanese-Brazilian painters appeared with brushstrokes of a
calligraphic extraction. Manabu Mabe painted ideograms, such as the farewell in Sayonara.
and Tomie Ohtake painted blindfolded, because the purpose was to deliver the experience
of painting time and not the conquest of space. The painting was the time that passes in
Zen-Buddhism. Flavio-Shiró, who spent his childhood in the Amazon and later went on to
divide his time between France and Brazil, used a brushstroke that united three worlds: the
memory of the snow and the ideogramatic calligraphy of Japan; the roots, lianas, marshes
and insects of the Amazon; and the gestures of French art.
At the end of the 1950s, Iberê Camargo was still a hesitant and intellectually conservative
artist in relation to modernity and, above all, did not take risks in his process of maturing
regarding ideas of abstract art. He certainly saw Shiró’s exhibition at MAM in Rio in 1959, in
which he may have discovered painting that was calligraphic (the ideogram that Iberê
transformed into signs), gesticular (the broad gesture demanding wider surfaces), with paint
formed on the canvas (and not on the palette), painting in whole arm movements (not only
with the wrist) and paint formed on the canvas with colours picked from the background of
the pictorial mass gamble. In this sense, Shiró was a master to Iberê.
Antonio Dias, Oswaldo Goeldi and Artur Barrio
Oswaldo Goeldi was an exemplary artist, who the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade
described as the prevalence of the moral night on the physical night. An artist of the
melancholy of the modern urban man, Goeldi was the model of austerity as an artist, with
predominately vigorous cut in the wooden matrix and, almost always, reducing the eventual
inclusion of colour to red. Carlos Zilio classed him as the Other in modernism, outside the
musical band of the avant-gardes.
Antonio Dias built a singular system of colour, which, because he never referred to a model,
was complex in its criteria. Colour is something that is requested by language, by the
material meaning of its discourse, by the relationship between manufacturing and work, by
violence, and by the amplitude of its human geography. At one point, the palette of Dias
had something of the work of Goeldi, his professor, in it. In the 1960s, Hélio Oiticica
considered Dias’ work to be a political and aesthetical turning point in Brazilian art.
During the dictatorship, Artur Barrio was a restless artist. His bundles, paintings padded with
a variety of objects made from blood, skins and absorbents, proposed a stripped down
aesthetic. Dropped at random, these bundles, which imitated “hams” (bodies of people
executed by the civil or political police), attracted curiosity and comments regarding the
violence of the State.