Galeria Millan, in partnership with Almeida e Dale, is pleased to announce its participation in Zona Maco 2022. The selection of works presents a panoramic view of the history of Brazilian art, suggesting possible connections between the productions of modernist artists and other national and Latin American traditions, as well as contemporary practices.
The selection brings together paintings by Candido Portinari, Di Cavalcanti and by the Mexicans Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo. Trained in the techniques of painting and mural painting, the four artists also converge regarding subject matter, as they address elements of popular, regional, and indigenous cultures. Strongly informed by themes of religious and popular traditions, Alfredo Volpi’s paintings of landscapes and popular festivities integrate the selection. The production of Eleonore Koch, a pupil of Volpi, manifests qualities similar to those of her master, such as the formal reduction of objects, the restrained use of color, and a certain tendency toward abstraction. Her paintings also show the influence of metaphysical painting, and the objects lend themselves to the painter’s task in a spiritual tone. Religious traditions, especially of Afro-Brazilian origin, as well as motifs and objects from the material culture of popular origin instruct the productions of Rubem Valentim and Mestre Didi. In the former, formal repetition and the structural composition of the pictorial field are techniques appropriated from constructivism and conjugated to religious motifs and emblems in the creation of a symbolic universe of their own. Starting in the 1980s, Mestre Didi begins the golden period of his sculptural work, which materially symbolizes Yoruba entities.
Following a modern formal and thematic inventory, Ana Prata and Guga Szabzon, each in their own way, decompose and disconcert figuration and abstraction techniques in works where the pictorial construction follows tortuous and improbable paths. In his recent works, Rodrigo Andrade highlights the ornamental motifs of modernism by rehabilitating them in monochromatic blocks that overlap and contaminate each other in the pictorial space. In the compositions by Maya Weishof and Thiago Martins de Melo, in turn, the vibrant and syncopated chromatic contrasts are highlighted by the density of the paint on canvas. Such emphasis on materiality is radicalized in the modest and contorted materials that Henrique Oliveira uses as a support for painting. In Paulo Pasta’s work, the soft chromatic variations in blocks of orthogonal lines, forming crosses and pillars, convey an idea of transcendental temporality. Density and conjunction qualify Tunga’s sculptures, where distinct materials oppose and contaminate each other. In Artur Barrio’s work, precarious objects of everyday use come together in a survival kit, stored in a bag with the inscription “transportable”. The approximation between text and image also occurs in the sculptures by Vanderlei Lopes, in which bronze is cast and hand-painted to resemble newspaper pages, with articles announcing political and social catastrophes that take place in urban centers. The collapse of urban life, a subject that dates back to early modernism, is also depicted frequently in Miguel Rio Branco’s photographs.