Abandoning conventional mediums, affirming subjectivity, experimentation, and using new technologies are often identified as distinctive features of contemporary art. Three great veteran artists, who have all passed through Millan and who are brought together in the exhibition O Legado Experimental [The Experimental Legacy] (Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, and Mira Schendel), were driving forces of this creative freedom. They also cleared the way for new generations, represented in this show by three artists, also linked to the gallery (Elena Damiani, Guga Szabzon, and Vivian Caccuri), who pay tribute to an artist who left us too early and who was once represented by Millan: Flávia Ribeiro, affectionately known in the art scene as Frapê.

Of the veterans cited above, Lygia Pape (1927-2004) and Mira Schendel (1919-1988) have already passed on, like Frapê (1954-2023), who died last October. All have works on paper in common, as demonstrated in this exhibition of works from different periods. All are closely related to the works of the artists who, today, follow these leaders in contemporary art, women who became protagonists of experimental art in the 1970s.

We must not forget that Maiolino’s art, especially her works on paper, reflects the milieu that surrounded her. Her drawings/objects from the 1970s have a great deal to do with Mira Schendel and Lygia Pape. This is demonstrated in Mira’s monotypes and the works on Japanese paper by Pape, a fundamental name in Neo-concretism, a historic movement in Brazilian contemporary art.

On the contrary, Anna Maiolino and Mira Schendel never considered themselves to be Neo-concrete artists. In fact, Maiolino always resisted “formal certainties,” which explains her adoption of flexible materials like clay, from the 1980s onwards, influenced by the Argentinian painter and sculptor Victor Grippo (1936-2002).

Clay is the prototype of matter, and not only because of its use in forming beings in the Old Testament. According to Maiolino, it contains the possibility of form. “And form organizes amorphic matter.” Just like that, as observable in the artist’s pieces selected for this exhibition.

Mira Schendel comments on this biblical ancestry in many of her monotypes, reaching an existentialist reflection in one of them, from 1964, Nel vuoto del mundo [The Void of the World], which represents a decisive moment in her career. In that era, Mira was particularly dedicated to Matter Painting, of which there are also examples in this exhibition (the 1960s temperas on jute).

The previously mentioned monotype, reproduced in a book by Cosac Naify, is the opposite of the affirmative attitude suggested by the compact texture of the paintings, resulting from an accumulation of cement, or sand. In the graphic work in question, the “void of the world” points to the advent of a new spatiality, shaped by its ontological concerns. The empty space, as we know, particularly affected the artist. The phrase inserted into the monotype summarizes the conflict of being on the threshold of a disappearing world.

Works from two historic series by the Neo-concrete artist Lygia Pape are included in the show — both from the 1960s, the same era that her inclusion in the movement was strengthened by the creation of Livro dos caminhos [Book of Paths] (1963/1976) and Livro do tempo [Book of Time] (1965). The first work comprises latex and acrylic paint on wood, with squares in relief, a direct allusion to a Mondrian series that also inspired Oiticica to create his Meta-schemes. The geometric shape (so dear to Albers) is revisited in Livro do tempo, a blue square on a white background, a symmetry also explored in the three-dimensional piece Volante [Steering Wheel] (1999), with its copper-plated iron base.

Like Maiolino, Lygia Pape worked with flexible materials. One of Pape’s concerns was incorporating the spectator in her work, giving them the freedom to handle the pieces, such as Sting amazonino (1990).

Shown in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, her series Amazoninos, as the title suggests, refers to the Amazonian region that inspired it, as well as to the anthropophagy of modernist Oswald de Andrade. In the series, plates in metallic paint that refer to Amazonian flora appropriate, in an anthropological way, Amerindian mythology, establishing a curious relationship with contemporaneity.

Similarly, the smooth texture of felt helped enrich the visual syntax of the young artist Guga Szabzon who, among many other references, adopts the ancestral geometry of patchworks from American indigenous communities, such as the Seminole tribe, a reference for another great textile artist, the North-American Sheila Hicks, who worked with the same geometric patterns.

Guga Szabzon (1987) follows this fine tradition, but renews it with a contemporary eye, confronting the instability of the world with the precision of the line and, occasionally, also of words, revealing an unexplored kinship with the work of both Mira Schendel and Anna Maiolino (particularly her Bordados [Embroideries]). The Dicionário de lugares imaginários [Dictionary of Imaginary Places], by the Argentinian writer Alberto Manguel has been an inexhaustible source for the São Paulo artist Guga. The real world might have insurmountable borders, but the worlds of art and literature do not. Guga moves between both, stitching maps and paths with lines embroidered on felt.

We see the same interest in building a personal cartography in the works of Peruvian artist Elena Damiani (1979). An architect by training, the artist is also interested in geology and archaeology. In the piece Transits and Occultations III (2021), the artist uses materials that carry a considerable historical weight (Via Lactea granite, travertine, and copper). Removed from their environments, they are recreated in a work that discusses relevant cultural issues and creates tension between the collective and existential personal collective experience.

Using unexpected elements — keys, nylon, and nails in My Mistake II (2015) — Vivian Caccuri (1986) arrives at the recent work Lava transparente II [Transparent Lava] (2023) with an even more diverse choice of materials: a brass bar, protective mesh screen, waxed thread, acrylic resin, beads, and stones. Vivian, who is from São Paulo, establishes a relationship with the viewer that goes beyond the limits of ordinary experience, combining sight and hearing in her research into the impact of sound waves on the body. In this sense, the work is very close to the experimentalism of Lygia Pape and Anna Maiolino, in particular, when we consider works by the latter such as Mais de 50 [More than 50] (from the series Preposições [Prepositions], 2008/2013). One example, among many others, of Vivian’s links to these historic artists in her work.