For the 20^th Bienal de São Paulo in 1989, the artist Emmanuel Nassar opened his exhibition with a work entitled A Fachada, produced especially for the international exhibition, a painting of large dimensions produced with industrial paint and sheets of metal. Against a yellow background a woman welcomes visitors with open arms into what might be a circus, and inside other paintings allude to the world of the circus and popular fairs. It was, as Nassar classified it, an ephemeral installation, a montage that reverberates throughout this current exhibition at Millan.

Each work here has its own autonomous existence, yet the exhibition was also conceived of as an installation consisting of 56 sheets of metal that run from floor to ceiling.r In the second room, smaller-scale works create a polarity between the gallery interior and exterior. The ambiguity of these pieces is immediately evident in the way they play with appearances: although extremely close to the pictorial tradition, these works are constructed from recycled boards of outdoor advertising or simply from reclaimed waste.

Naturally, this procedure echoes North American pop painting produced in the 1960s by names such as Robert Indiana (1928-2018), but also artists from the British movement that anticipated it, in particular Derek Boshier, the British pop art pioneer who shifted from painting to photography and back to painting. In both cases, the appropriation of the language of advertising and the encounter between popular and erudite culture led to a confrontation with the world of consumerism that so strongly marked Nassar’s generation. The artist from Pará was born 74 years ago.

In terms of the similarities with Indiana’s ‘assemblages’ or Boshier’s political manifestos, Emmanuel Nassar’s pop art is genuinely Brazilian, not only in its reliance on a precarious aesthetic (scratched or corroded metal sheets) but in the way it values popular and regional visual culture (in this case Amazonian culture), as he recycles pieces produced by local artisans from Belém and crosses the boundary between these two apparently irreconcilable worlds.

While the North American or British pop sensibility was subversive and deconstructed our perception of what was real, Emmanuel Nassar’s Brazilian pop distances itself from them by demolishing the entire apparatus of the history of art based on the question of authorship. North American pop, despite having opted for parody (Lichtenstein, for instance) or the resignification of symbols of patriotism (in the case of Jasper Johns), ended up conceding to Warhol’s view, in particular the former: that art would no longer be sacred, and that a good artist would be one who most resembled a businessperson.

Well, Emmanuel Nassar challenges Warhol. He never took on the role of pop executive. There are various ways this language can be used: Claes Oldenburg sought inspiration in everyday objects (from spoons to street signs) to make what he called political pop; Rauschenberg, the inventor of “combine painting’ found in this assemblage a way of bringing art and existential experience closer together, showing how painting could be close to social issues. Nassar took this shortcut. And changed its path.

This migration of pop to the southern hemisphere brought with it a political baggage that was quickly absorbed by Brazilian artists such as Antonio Dias (1944-2018) from Paraiba, Rubens Gerchman from Rio (1942-2008) Claudio Tozzi (1944) from São Paulo. Emmanuel Nassar belongs to this lineage, but his spiritual ancestors appropriated mass culture, in particular comics, in a different way.

Nassar’s solar, equatorial colors were put to use in suburban scrap yards and urban trash with a sense of thrift, without a discourse that leant on the precarious but rather transforming the rudimentary into the exceptional. Yes, there is irony in Emmanuel Nasser’s work, but not parody. “I see all, but live in the particular”, the artist wrote about a work entitled Céu azul [Blue sky], in 2010. Further proof can be found in a work from a more recent series, Trapioca Box (2021), a collection of found objects that Nassar gathered from street markets, whose title ironically combines the word tapioca with the English word trap. A trap for the gaze, therefore.

A parallel might better explain this “trickery”, the dialogue between the strong colors and the rigorous geometrization of North American Peter Halley (1953), also represented by Millan. Often identified as an acolyte of Baudrillard, in his “cannibalization” of modernist abstraction, Halley occupies a space in which he also expresses Nassar’s appropriation, yet with a difference: critic of the geometrization of modern life, Halley replicates on canvas the simulated space of electronic circuits and videogames.

Nassar, distrustful of the paths taken by high tech, emphasizes that the presence of precariousness in the urban lives of Brazilians leads to a reconsideration of the emotional role that materials from the past have in the construction of the future. Qualified as an architect, the Brazilian artist developed a relationship between what he saw in foreign books and his peripheral reality, between high tech and the built world south of the Equator. As a type of mediator between two worlds he crosses over this frontier in the exhibition by separating the industrialized (metal sheets in zinc or aluminum) from the artisanal (pieces in wood, canvases, sieves), in the second room of the exhibition.

Nassar has been investigating the dysfunctional machine of the far-from-admirable new world of consumerism and high tech for over 40 years.  This research began with the Recepcor series (1980/81), which features paintings on wood and panels with bold colors and geometry, containing popular references he would go on to explore in works such as Arraial (1984), a circus entrance similar to the work presented at the 1989 Bienal (A Fachada) and the portal that separates the two rooms in this exhibition.

Nassar notes this exhibition has the quality of a retrospective. “For an artist over 70 every exhibition is retrospective”, he justifies. Some works go on to develop further in others. Series such as the redesigned flags of the 1990s, now in the collection of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, are revisited, but following the same aesthetic principle that opposed the nationalist appropriation of the symbol. It is worth remembering that in 2011 he deconstructed a Brazilian flag switching the colors for a monochromatic gray, placing a single star above the strip of white representing the state of Pará and replacing the positivist motto “Order and Progress” with his initials “EN”. This search for a national identity has nothing to do with nationalism, Nassar seems to say, who flees an idealized past in purging its excesses. Everything in him tends towards the synthetical, the essential. And it is the synthesis of a career that we see here in this exhibition.