For SP-Arte: Rotas Brasileiras, Millan presents a selection of artists who urge us to look at the different transits that constitute Brazilian arts and culture. We present artists whose works address the tradition of Brazilian Modern Art and advance the pictorial, sculptural, and thematic debates posed by it, also contributing to raise national art to a global level, establishing new flows of exchange and anthropophagy. Along with them, also on display are works by artists who cross contemporary art operations with ancestral techniques, cosmovisions, and their own experiences and territorialities. These productions open paths to the protagonism of previously ignored knowledge, provide new perspectives to our history, and glimpse new possible paths. Presenting artists from the North, South, and Southeast of the country, at different points in their trajectories, the works on display remind us of the diversity of cultures and expressions in all regions of Brazil.
Operating in the encounter between the fields of contemporary art, so-called popular art, ritual, and everyday practices, artists such as Jaider Esbell, Gustavo Caboco and Lidia Lisbôa push the boundaries of contemporary art and destabilize the hierarchies between knowledges, schools and traditions, gender, and geographical regions. Their works advance over the research posed by modernism insofar as they question this legacy and start from the self-representation of indigenous and afro-diasporic cultures, presenting non-totalizing visions of Brazilian cultures and pointing out urgencies such as the preservation of Brazilian biomes and the struggles for the rights of indigenous populations, afro-Brazilians and women.
Productions such as these show us the multiplicity of languages and possible directions in contemporary art when references from other universes are incorporated into artistic practice. Among them, Nati Canto, by using culinary techniques and materials, creates objects that are located between painting, sculpture, and installation. By crossing experiences with art and gastronomy, the artist’s production leads us to reflect on the symbolic and sensorial importance of the act of cooking and eating, as well as of digestion in our bodies.
The works of Emmanuel Nassar, Lais Myrrha and Vanderlei Lopes are also part of these examples, questioning symbols and representations of a supposed national art, considering the blind spots of modernization projects and pointing out social, geopolitical, and environmental issues entangled in this history. Without leaving aside investigations into painting and sculpture themselves, mobilizing in their practices debates intrinsic to the production of art.
In this sense, Arena (2019) by Vanderlei Lopes, intertwines debates about mimesis, representation, and fiction with a critical look at Brazilian history. Over the stump and roots of what was certainly an enormous Paineira tree, now presented in patinated bronze, a circular arena opens. The work creates a privileged place to watch the historical disputes over the extraction of natural resources and the imposition of urban space over nature - causes of deforestation and degradation of natural biomes - as well as the stage for debates and assemblies, rethinking the arena as a space for democracy. Equally, the work refers to soccer matches, an emblematic sport in national sociability and culture, but not exempt from social and economic clashes.
Environmental debates and the imitation of reality by art are also issues raised by Henrique Oliveira’s work. Using a variety of materials, the artist creates sculptures, objects and installations that resemble tree trunks with shapes that refer to architecture, knots, and Möbius ribbons. In the experience with his works there is a strangeness between materiality and form, while, through the game of scales, the relations between humanity and nature are questioned.
Nassar, in his celebrated career, expands the possibilities of the two-dimensional support and combines the artistic tradition with elements - and objects - from popular culture, with a production that at the same time denounces precariousness and recognizes the unique solutions that arise from it. In dialogue with Concretism and Neo-Concretism, as well as Pop and Tropicalism, his work provides institutional art with references from popular culture and vice-versa.
Equally tensioning the different valuations of cultures and matrices of knowledge, Vivian Caccuri’s production touch upon sound, music, and medical history to counteract colonial narratives. In her recent works, the artist highlights medical and cultural events since the colonization of the Americas through the agency of mosquitoes, tiny beings that pose great threat to human life. With research also focused on investigating the physical and social perceptions of sound, Caccuri’s work gains even more actuality by balancing the human relationship with the unwanted buzzing of insects to society’s stigmatized view of funk music.
With this selection of works and artists from different regions of the country and at different points in their careers, Millan seeks to point out the routes that have been opening for the art produced throughout Brazil, as well as to accentuate the diverse flows and paths traced in recent decades.