by Wild sambas and tight abstractions, vibrating lines and eye-catching triangle arrangements. Weddings in the church and a walk in the park. Rationality and religion, grid and carnival collide in Some May Work As Symbols at Raven Row. The exhibition complements between Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador in the state of Bahia, between opposite ways of looking and thinking and being in the world.
Subtitled Art Made in Brazil 1950s-70s, the exhibition is both playful and surprisingly incomprehensible, jumping from place to place, between the conflicting strains of the local and the international, and the different strands of Brazilian culture. Pleasure is all about the variety, the quiet moments and the humor, just some of it. Based largely on the holdings of four Brazilian museum collections, the exhibition is interesting in its dissonance. The sculptures of the Candomblé priest Mestre Didi meet Bauhaus-inspired construction. Rectangles by Hélio Oiticica crawling on a flat background and characteristic birds hunting the banks of the river in a tapestry by Madalena Santos Reinbolt. Puckered globes of paint stamp biliously across the surfaces of Zero Group artist Almir Mavignier’s optically and materially disturbed canvases, while the glowering head of a bull has a fish for a nose in one of Abdias do Nascimento’s flagship paintings.
One moment I am caught by the phenomenological rituals of two black squares by Willys de Castro in different colors, and the next I am immersed in the disturbing work of the samba musician, furniture and clothing designer and painter Heitor dos Prazeres, whose paintings are again and again in different rooms. The more I look, the bigger these are. Girls in striped dresses dance with parasols in the street, people crowd the favela and play music under a tree. They all wear amazing clothes and dance on their tiny, well-sodden legs, but it’s these people’s mouths that get me. Seen in profile, the Dos Prazeres have serious dental problems, their teeth sticking out as if they had shuttlecocks stuck between their lips. Seen straight on, their mouths are as frightening as lampreys or B-movie vampires. This sort of thing stops you in your tracks.
We constantly have to recalibrate when we go from the sharp pleasures of the orthogonal and the rational to the folkloric and the fantastic, or from the progression of finely controlled and drawn lines by Judith Lauand to a carved wooden statue of a mother and child by Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos, whose art was based on his African heritage.
Suddenly it’s lunchtime. The children are busy at their own table and the adults are eating and talking and scrambling for dishes. Rich in detail, everything – from the dishes of cutlets and stews to the stuff piled up in the sink, from the beer bottles to the fruit in the bowl – lurches from the surface in a lump with relief, the oil paint is put up with plaster and hair. This lively scene from 1974, by the self-taught painter Maria Auxiliadora, is a delight, and a delight at the precise and the inept. The floor tiles are a mad lattice and the embroidery on the damask tablecloths is precisely picked out.
The best known conflicts in post-war Brazilian art are those between the different branches of geometric abstraction that arose after the Swiss artist, architect and designer Max Bill exhibited in Rio in 1950 and at the Sao biennial Paulo in 1951, and then went on to help settle. up the Technical School of Creation in Rio, whose ideas were distilled from futurism, de Stijl and the Bauhaus. Bill’s approach influenced the Brazilian president at the time, Juscelino Kubitschek, in his attempt to modernize the country through industrial development and the creation of liberal democracy – based, according to conservatives Pablo Lafuente and Thiago de Paula Souza, on rational positivist principles, which showed Bill’s work.
The subsequent developments and splits within geometric abstraction as it developed in the 1950s in Brazil probably do not bother anyone now as they once did. One of the pleasures among the collection of historical essays in the small catalog accompanying the show is a 1967 text by the critic Frederico Morais, entitled Concrete/Neo-concrete: Who is, Who is not, who went, who who went before, who touched So, who stayed, left, returned, was there Concretism? The title alone says it all.
There is great abstract art here, each with a life of its own. Much of it looks as fresh as it did 50 or 60 years ago. We look at it differently now, of course, less burdened by its purity. Some May Work As Symbols is an insight into a complex social and cultural situation, and presents a kind of corrective to the potted stereotyping history of post-war Brazilian art. It is filled with wonder, the everyday, the utopian and the conflict. two snakes coil from a palm, in one of Didi’s sculptures, and nearby, a mute disc, by Lygia Clark, hangs from the wall, like some kind of industrially made eclipse. Perhaps there is more to their proximity than meets the eye.
