One of the main lines of action for the exhibition programme of the Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR is the history of Brazilian art, giving special attention to the constant critical revision of its principles. Broadening this vocation, under the management of Instituto Odeon, MAR presents A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil], a panoramic exhibition surrounding questions and projects of colour from Brazilian artistic production, under the curatorship of Paulo Herkenhoff and Marcelo Campos.

Brought together here are iconic works from the 20th century, which reveal artworks that remain little-known, or even unpublished in historic and contemporary terms. They are precise choices, whose synthesis outlines structural points in the chromatic question, like the relationship with nature, with politics or its vigorous cultural diversity, the reason that MAR has brought the painting Abaporu (1928), by Tarsila do Amaral, to Rio de Janeiro, an emblematic work from the Brazilian Anthropophagic Movement. There are also equally fundamental presences – such as masterpieces by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall, Carybé, Ismael Nery –, which constitute a fabric of artistic excellency that salutes Olympic Rio.

With special pleasure, MAR receives its public for A cor do Brasil, noting that given previously agreed commitments, some artworks will only remain for the duration of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, and the third room of the exhibition – dedicated to the turn of the 20th to 21st century – will remain on show only until October. The articulation that made the uniting of these works possible, the result of much research and generosity, led by Paulo Herkenhoff, was only made possible thanks to the immeasurable collaboration of institutions, collectors and artists from all over Brazil and other countries. To one and all of them, our sincere gratitude.

Carlos Gradim

Director-president of Instituto Odeon

Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR

There is no neutral colour. As well as being an optical phenomenon, colour is a social construction. And as it acts in the field of sensitivity, it also acts politically. As such, from the experimentation of forms of perception to the public dimension of colour, colouring has never been a naive, apolitical, or an arbitrary act. There are many projects of colour in society.

The exhibition A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] presents the inflections and transformations of colour in the history of Brazilian art. Starting from the dramatic colour projects of Baroque, the chromatic pallet of nature of the travelling painters from the 17th-19th centuries, and from French-like academic investigations, the exhibition opens a wide panorama for modern experimentations relating to colour in the 20th century. Works by such important artists as Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Flávio de Carvalho, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Ismael Nery, Lasar Segall, Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Candido Portinari form a vibrant journey through the historical moment in which Brazil invented itself as a nation, from the plethora of colours of the Brazilwood tree, in which colour takes on a crucial role.

Moving on, the second room of the exhibition shows the period in which the disconnection of colour from its nationalist dimension was sought, in order to radicalise experiments that were, as a priority, perceptive, and linked to the autonomy of art. It is the environment both

of the Bernardelli Group, with the first exercises into abstract, as well as the constructive affirmation of Brazil, with the concrete and neo-concrete movements, from which the masterpieces of artists who remain little-known to the public stand out here, such as Décio Vieira, Aluísio Carvão and Ivan Serpa.

The last room of the exhibition sets off from the abstract Japanese gesticularity of artists like Manabu Mabe, Flávio-Shiró and Tomie Ohtake, and leads the visitor to the voluptuousness of the gesticular colour of the 80s generation, whose research into painting made up a unique phase of art in the country. Reaching the 21st century, the colour of Brazil returns to the implications and political projects of colour in the present, now considering an expanded Brazil, from North to South, the example of a nucleus dedicated to the revision of the idea of a "national", which has the flag as its greatest icon.

Multiple intentions and resonances of colour are revealed through art: colour invents a nation; it transforms it into a republic; it recreates – through the landscape – the relationship of man with nature, with the earth, with minerals, with the sky, and with the clouds; it interposes science and art; it promotes meetings between distinct cultures, forms of colouring the body, and the political affirmation between colour and ethnicity; it repositions the body; it acts politically; and it symbolises. It constantly recreates means of perception, even in the absence of colour, or in projects of “inexistent colour” (Israel Pedrosa).

What is imperative in A cor do Brasil is the strength of art from one of its essential, and therefore fundamental gestures: the invention of colour.

Paulo Herkenhoff and Marcelo Campos

Curators

Colour, life, struggle and resistance

The socio-political experiences that underlie Anna Maria Maiolino's severe colour project are crossed by the trauma of private hardships that arise from the Second World War, and by a history of migrations. Her reduced group of colours builds the visual forcefulness that investigates the place of the wandering subject in the modern world, the fluid roles of the woman, the significant moments of art in society, the primal matter of the world, bread, desire, love, fear and anthropophagic hunger. Her Mapa mentais [Mental maps] give an account of a personal itinerary that finds refuge only in the exposure of homelessness. The sanguine red that crosses her work is the sufficiency of the vital colour that solves the extremes of the absolute absence of light in the darkness, or the blinding luminosity. For Anna Maria, talking about oneself affirms that every individual has their own inventory of losses, folds in the soul, vibrant body memories, belongings. For her, a place is the space where subjectivity can exist, in search of the painful fullness of expression. It is from this broad cartography between struggle and resistance that the positivity of this work on the happiness and pain of living comes from.

Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc]

The act of Waltercio Caldas is simple: covering a book on Matisse, the artist of sensual and vibrant colours, with talcum powder. But its meaning is complex. Matisse com talco

[Matisse with talc] refers to the history of science and modern art, and to the disc that was created by the physicist Isaac Newton, a circle painted with the seven colours present in sunlight (those of the rainbow). When Newton’s disc is set in motion, the colours overlap in our eye (on the retina) and we get the sensation of a mixture. With speed, comes the illusion of the set of colours turning grey or white.

Matisse com talco shows how our eye works in its astonishment. The work discusses the search for the zero degree of Suprematism painting by Malevich, the artist who painted white on white in search of the primordial light of the world, and the primal moment of the white canvas before painting.

Waltercio’s work allows us to mention A estética da vida [The aesthetic of life] (1921), by Graça Aranha, which constituted a breviary of modern colour in Brazil, by proposing that artists convert light into colour. In a broad sense, Matisse com talco is the emblem that signifies A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] itself, because it is the key-work that results in the imaginary hypothesis of combining all the colours of the exhibition.

The Bernardelli Group

In 1931, as opposition to the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, there were two masters of artistic training: Alberto da Veiga Guignard, at Pró-Arte, and Bruno Lechowski, from the Bernardelli Group. The latter brought together artists from the middle classes, or those with little resources, in a new, social scope of modernism – Bráulio Poiava, Edson Motta, Eugênio Sigaud, Joaquim Tenreiro, Quirino Campofiorito, José Pancetti, Milton Dacosta, Manoel Santiago and others. There they discussed the relationship between painting and nature, and material and language in the assembling of a painting. Lechowski absorbed notions of formism from the Polish painter Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939), such as the autonomy of art, the definition of the painting by the empirical reality of its material, and the flatness of the canvas. His colours are located between the sunsets and solar stridencies relating to the chromatic agenda of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) and the answers to the tropics. A painting by Lechowski is, above all, a text of the matter.

In Dacosta, the constructive lessons, the cubist deformations and the balance of the colouristic plans are precocious concerns (Mário Pedrosa). Pancetti "doesn't document anything" (Ruben Navarra). "Who I owe most to is the painter Bruno Lechowski, who was interested in me and helped me with his words of advice" (Pancetti). Lechowski taught the sailor to paint his own sea, to produce a personal sea. In Pancetti, what prevails is the synthesis, the economy, the notion of structure in sombre colours, the leaden sea, the end for the disembarking sailor. In the Bernardelli Group, Pancetti and Dacosta looked for painting, and no longer a Brazil (Carlos Zilio). In Anita e natureza-morta de livros, frutas e jarro com girassóis [Anita and the still-life of books, fruit and jar with sunflower], the model looks at the spectator with a fixed gaze. The sunflower stares at the spectator like an extra eye that reinforces the discussion over the gaze. The painter's optical space allows him to measure distances and intervals in his universe, composed of two painted canvases, a landscape and a portrait, his fundamental subjects. The fruit is arranged as a still-life of fruit and a book by publisher José Olympio. The model’s gaze to the Other as the only possibility of escaping closure.

The painters of Maurício de Nassau

To recognise the territory and the economic potential of Brazil, the Company of the West Indies, led by Maurício de Nassau from 1636, brought together scientists and artists, a unique group in the Americas. Landscaper Frans Post (1612-1680) stands out in the registration of the physical and social environment of life in the colony. Albert Eckhout (1610-1665) is a more anthropologic artist of an ethnic background, even representing indians and cannibalism. Gillis Peeters (1612-1653), a precocious cartographic painter, also created tropical fantasies. Prosperity in Holland united trade, knowledge and art in the period known as the Golden Century, with painters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. A sombre baroque prevailed, with no taste for the splendour of production from Italy and Flanders.

On returning to Holland, Post continued producing variations of his Brazilian landscapes, starting from sketches and adding elements of exotic fantasy and bright colours. Certain sombre aspects refer to the Dutch tonal landscapes. The horizon has more attention, with bluish atmospheric perspective. The landscape becomes flatter like the geography of Holland. The painting features enormous notable details like the vegetation and rare animals that populate the scene - Post had met the German naturalist George Marcgraf, who had also been to Brazil. Some of his colours changed with time. Post notes the sugar cane mill, the house fronts, the chapel. It is Sunday, the colonial settlers appear to go to church, while on their day off established by Nassau, slaves are shown at a party.

Colours of the earth

The pigments of the ground, used initially as a pictorial material available in the colony by Mestre Ataíde, are converted into a potent mark of Brazilianess in their own modern pictorial sign. This is a singular aspect of Brazilian art. The soil, loaded with oxides and other minerals, has offered a model of red for generations of artists, and the material iron for the raw steel (corten) sculpture of Amilcar de Castro. Frans Krajcberg is the most solid founder of this vision, having travelled, above all, to Minas Gerais looking for minerals. Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Alfredo Volpi, Arthur Luiz Piza, Manfredo de Souzanetto, Katie van Scherpenberg, Carlos Vergara, Niura Bellavinha, Sandra Gamarra (on the Mariana mud) and others, are among the artists who have contributed to the greatest density of this identity project beyond the light-colour, the colour of the countryside, or tropicalism.

The invention of the ancestral colour

Vicente do Rego Monetiro opens the Brazilian modernist project of colour starting from his studies of Amazonian archaeology at the Museu Nacional in the 1910s. The conceptual base of his colour system incorporates the plastic values of Amazonian archaeology, such as palette, volume, form and the reduction of figure. The colours evoke the baked earth and engobe painting. The figures have willing volumetry in ceramic reliefs. The anatomic code, defined based on pre-Cabral pieces, allows us to retrace the body in Mulher sentada [Sitting woman] (1924) as the structure of a marajoara vase. If to Hegel the jungle was a space outside of history, to Rego Monteiro it would be the only possibility for composing an indigenous history, prior to colonisation, for the political project of cultural emancipation.

The invention of Rio

Painting in colonial Brazil was scarce, and low quality, worth it for the iconography. Landscape was discouraged for fear that it could facilitate greed in enemy powers. With the economic progress of Bahia and Minas Gerais in the 18th century, a few painters appeared from the region, mostly in religious art, such as José Teófilo de Jesus and Mestre Ataíde.

The Escola Fluminense de Pintura consisted of Frei Ricardo do Pilar and, in the 18th century, Raimundo da Costa e Silva, Manuel Dias de Oliveira and others. In Rio, capital of the vice-royalty, art of a civil nature is outlined in paintings rich in details of day-to-day life, and of notable facts and days of celebration. The greatest legacy of Francisco Muzzi is the pair about the Incêndio do Recolhimento de Nossa Senhora do Parto [Fire of the Gathering of Our Lady of the Birth] and its Reconstrução [Reconstruction] (1789), with good documentation of fire-fighting, architecture and engineering in the city.

The elliptic paintings of Leandro Joaquim invent Rio in order to adorn a pavilion in the Passeio Público park. There are many compelling visual narratives of colonial Brazil: Procissão marítima [Maritime Procession], Pesca da baleia na baía de Guanabara [Whale hunting in Guanabara Bay], Vista da Igreja e Praia da Glória [View of Glória Church and Beach], Vista da lagoa do Boqueirão e do aqueduto de Santa Tereza [View of the Boqueirao Lagoon and the Santa Tereza aqueduct], Revista militar no Largo do Paço [Military march in Paço Square] and Visita de uma esquadra inglesa na baía de Guanabara [Visit of a British squadron to Guanabara Bay]. The bright chromatic contrasts, the luminosity, and the documentation of daily life, economic activities, aspects of the city, and carelessness in the representation of the mountains, all contribute to a graciousness in the set of works, which is the most abundant pictorial document of life in the capital of the colony and, above all, expresses the need for a symbolic representation of the city.

Little red feathered headdress, white beads, brown in a reddish way, headdress with yellow feathers, a brown parrot, chequered colours, black paint, modes of blue, and other coloured chequers, red hoods, red caps, yellow feathered caps, others, in red, and others in greens, the dye was red, black dye, green stone, red cap, green leave huts, bird feather bonnets, of the green kind and of the yellow kind, green sea urchins, little red grains, red parrots, very red and well formed, and two small green ones and green feather hoods, and a cloth of feathers of many colours, red wax.

What is the colour of Brazil?

A colour of Brazil does not exist. A cor do Brasil [The colour of Brazil] proposes transversal histories by sets and masterpieces, or individuals with the capacity of meanings of aesthetical dimensions, through samples and cuts. With the explosion of art in the country in the 1960s, the necessary focus is returned to the colour of Rio. Far from defining the best, this exhibition organises a collective writing on the colour of Brazil, taken in a trans-historic and trans-territorial format, in a vision that indicates hypotheses, among so many others. If the possibilities of colour in the colony reflect the availability of pigments, we can understand the theories and the experiences of colour, laid out in Brazil as a pathos that is baroque, neoclassical, the light-colour of the sublime, the wisdom and lightness in Eliseu Visconti, colour that is modern before modernism, anatomic transgressions of the colour of

complexion, the black sun of melancholy, the tripod of A estética da vida [The aesthetic of life], Matavirgism, Brazilwood and anthropophagy, colour-with-the-smell-of-fruit, all the colours of Carnival, the colour of the countryside, naive colour, vernacular taste, concretist canon, neo-concrete invention, the devouring of Mondrian, supra-sensorial and pluri-sensorial Tropicalia, cerne-colour, popcrete colour, Volpi simply Volpi, torrid colour, Newton’s disk in Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc], blinded by the light, infra-sensorial, colour strike, visceral, dirty colour, the earthy colour of natural pigments and anilines, monochromes, political struggle, monetary colour, witnessed violence, live mud, body painting, neo-baroque, pollution, new objectivity, O rei do mau gosto [The King of bad taste], colour-concept, seduction, subjectivity of colour, cotton nylon stocking, post-production, Japanese colour, struggle, the colour emblematic of football and parties, kitsch, armorial agenda, real vigour, chromatic farofa, Amazonian visuality, Afro-Brazilian colour, symbolic indigenous universes, Brazilian riskiness, colour of signs, official colours, colour of industrial things, citationism, political colour, non-existent colour, Desvio para o vermelho [Detour to red], the taste of blue, swellings of rumours of language, the colour of the donkey when it flees.

The Anthropophagic woman

Her master, Fernand Léger, recommended the contrast between shapes and the local colour, decisive bases for the decision of Tarsila do Amaral to “paint in Brazilian”. In Carnival of 1924, Tarsila and Oswald de Andrade visited Rio, where he launched the Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil [Manifesto of Brazilwood poetry] (“The saffron shacks and ocher greens of the favela under the cabralian blue are aesthetic facts”). She painted the pictures Morro da Favela [Favela Hill] (Providência Hill), Carnaval em Madureira [Carnival in Madureira] and Palmeiras [Palm trees]. Her palette developed based on the vibrations of the party, of the vernacular colours of the shacks and the miner's prayers. The palms transformed into a stylem, a unit of style.

The social formation of Brazil is a process of meetings between cultures. In A estética da vida [The aesthetic of life] (1921), Graça Aranha mounts a support on which Brazilian culture would be supported: The Portuguese melancholy, the “African childishness” - the saffron shacks and the ocher in the greens of the favela under the Cabralian sky are aesthetic facts (“cosmic terror”) – and the “metaphysics of terror” of the indians (filling the spaces between the human spirit and nature with ghosts). Oswald de Andrade takes up this theory of Brazil in the Manifesto antropófago [Anthropophagic manifesto] (1928), which proclaims: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically”. Starting with the painting Antropofagia [Anthropophagy], she points to cannibalism, because “antropos” means humans and “fagia”, to eat. In art, cultural exchange between societies is designated the act of feeding from the culture of the other to form your own. “I’m only interested in what is not mine. The law of man. The law of Anthropophagy.” The painting Abaporu (1928), which means “the man that eats people” in the Tupi-Guarani language, gives origin to her anthropophagic production, which implies the idea of communion with nature, ghostly forms, cultural exchanges, vast metaphysical spaces, the nocturnal atmosphere of dreams like in Surrealism, restlessness and mystery. Her flowers have a connotation of devouring and erotic desire. After anthropophagy, Tarsila will have social concerns.

Nature and history

The agenda of Brazilian art is modernised with the installation of the Portuguese court in the country and the contraction of the French Artistic Mission. There appeared landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, paintings of history, sacred art, art for the State, scenography, and scenes of civil life.

The first still-lifes with Brazilian fruit are by Albert Eckhout, a Nassau painter. In Holland, still-life had the moral value of vanitas, which affirmed the transitory nature of beauty, art, knowledge and of the power in front of death to unite fruit, animals, art, books, jewels, tools and symbols of power. In Brazil, still-life celebrated bountiful tropical exuberance, with Reis de Carvalho, the sumptuous flowers of Agostinho da Motta, the abundant Estêvão Silva, and Francisca Manoela Valadão, who united fruits, greens, vegetables, animals and gained slaves.

Silva exhibited the still-lifes on walls of fabric, behind which he left pieces of fruit that give off a smell to articulate both vision and nose, a more abstract meaning, in the phenomenology experience of the senses. An Afro-descendent, he refused honours in protest against slavery, constituting a model of resistance art.

The painting of history arose in Brazil with allegories and the registers by Debret to the service of the court. Its uptake resulted in the monumental machines Batalha do Avaí [Battle of Avaí], by Pedro Américo, and Batalha dos Guararapes [Battle of Guararapes], by Victor Meireles, shown as the mark of the foundation of nationality with the defeat of the Dutch by the Portuguese, indians and Africans. Pedro Américo painted Independência ou morte [Independence or death], an official work for the governor of the province of São Paulo, already in the political construction of its symbolic hegemony. A positivist and republican, he is a friend of Pedro II – hence the grandiloquent scene of Tiradentes esquartejado [Tiradentes quartered] (1893), sentenced by Mary I, the great-grandmother of the Emperor, only to be painted after his death and the proclamation of the republic. The dramatic scene of the martyr of independence, inspired by Géricault, conforms to the map of Brazil with its members in pieces.

Modern women

At the start of the 20th century, modern women came forward who broke with patriarchy in art: Nair de Teffé, Anna and Maria Vasco and Anita Malfatti. The seascapes by sisters Anna and Maria Vasco built the time with the fluid material of the watercolour and the surface, with free gestures that revealed the conscience of the plastic-abstract values of brush strokes. The transgressive Nair de Teffé, pioneer of automobile driving, is an ironic caricature. Married to president Hermes da Fonseca, she introduced the guitar and the music of Chiquinha Gonzaga at the Catete Palace, in a rupture of social standards.

Anita Malfatti studied in Berlin and New York. The teaching methods of her professor, Homer Boss, included a boat trip on the choppy coastline around Maine. Back on land, the students painted. Anita responded to the shaking of the excursion with nervous brush strokes that destabilised the surface in waves, winds and rocks. In portraits, the construction of subject went on to be performed with vigorous brush strokes and the absence of design. Strident colour accentuates the psychology of the characters and betrays the anatomy, like in O homem amarelo [The yellow man]. The poet Oswald de Andrade called her “Anita Malfeita” (Anita badly done) and she herself recognised: “I am Malfatti, which in Italian means badly done. But I have the talent to overcome this.” It is difficult to

exhibit in Brazil. Monteiro Lobato makes a scathing critique, “Paranoia or mystification?”: or that expressionist painting is the art of a crazy person or the scribbling of a child. The writer articulates three forms of limited capacity in the new Brazilian Civil Code against Anita: the woman, the crazy person, and the child. The trigger and martyr of modernism, Anita is, to Mário de Andrade, the revelation of the new and the conviction of the revolution. Anita provoked symptoms of social intolerance in the modern.

Alberto da Veiga Guignard

Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s interest in nature arose from the low-lying vegetation of the Botanical Garden in Rio and grew to include groups of upright trees. The vegetation of the Atlantic Rainforest, which João Baptista da Costa worked on with intricacies of greens in the sunlight and the shade, taught the artist a lot.

Trans-cultural construction in Guignard’s landscapes: Chineseries, Japanism, the tradition of the atmospheric European painting of German painter Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), the solarity of Grünewald, the capriccio, an angel by Rembrandt, and the romantic vision of the cosmos of Humboldt, from popular painting of Brazil.

The sublime in the painting emerges unexpectedly from the traffic of the minerality of rock to water, of granite to cloud. Guignard deals with the black person as subjectivity and the agent of history, not as folklore, but as the work ethos of the black person in Brazil. His spatial imagination of abysses and skies visited the unlimited. His Noite de São João [São João Night] eliminates the mesh and arms the fluency of an endless fall or an incalculable ascent, because from there he searched for the edges of the universe. Guignard asks for our doubt: is this mountain really sky?

Alberto da Veiga Guignard

Stories of trees. The 1st Brazilian Conference for the Protection of Nature, held in Rio in 1934, must have touched Alberto da Veiga Guignard, because in this period he deepened his interest in the live nature in gardens: the vegetation in the tufts, the lake of giant lilies and pool of lily pads at the Botanical Gardens in Rio are from this period. Later come homogenous clusters of vertical trees of the same species (Bambuzal) and gardens in frontal and elevated views. João Baptista da Costa was the informal master of Guignard for the chromatic value of the lightness of vegetation. The vegetation of the Atlantic rainforest is worked on in the painting by Baptista da Costa with careful use of greens in relation to the sources of light, shadows and the translucence of the leaves.

Stories of mountains. From the oldest bodies in the world (600 million years old), Guignard’s Serra do Mar mountain range is the age of the Earth as a locus of the evocation of colonial history, and of a time in suspension. The whistle of the locomotive in Paisagem imaginária [Imaginary landscape] can only be the Trenzinho caipira [Little countryside train] of Heitor Villa-Lobos. The mountain is Guignard’s Angelus Novus, Paul Klee’s image that was taken by Walter Benjamin as an emblem of history: the impotence in relation to the past and the way that we are propelled to the future. The sublime emerges unexpectedly from the traffic of the minerality of rock to water, from granite to cloud. The most solid, in geologic convulsion on the surface of the landscape, are bodies of water. The oil paint, thin and fast like watercolour, protagonises the depth of tectonic revolutions in the shallows of the surface as an uprising from the abyss for the settlement of the visible.

Stories of black people. Guignard deals with the black person as subjectivity and an agent of history, far away from the folklore of Mário de Andrade. There is a sweaty black man, the humidity of the face is the political vestige of the energy spent at work. Against the lecherous paradigm of colonial debauchery, the painter drew the affectionate ties of Afro-descendent families. A execução de Tiradentes [The execution of Tiradentes] presents the cycle of extraction and exportation of gold, from the mines to the port and the progressive enrichment of the intermediaries and the oppression of the slave. His post-colonial vision shows the marks of slavery in modern Brazil, the contradictions and the added value. Violence is in the scenes of the Passion, because the flogged Christ of Guignard is the slave on the pillory post. In a view of Ouro Preto, Guignard creates a fictional portrait of Aleijadinho, showing his work and imagining his personality to proclaim the Afro-descendent pillar of Brazilian culture. Guignard, like Lasar Segall, projected the work ethos of the black person in Brazil.

Stories of clouds and fluctuations. Guignard’s spatial imagination for abysses and skies

visited the unlimited. His Paisagens imaginárias [Imaginary landscapes] eliminated the mesh and armed the fluency of an endless fall, or an incalculable assent, because from there they searched for the edges of the universe. Guignard asks for our doubts: is this mountain actually mist? This is painting and materiality, not to be confused with ethereal mass. The rock is there – for millions of years – but they are landscapes in a state of transience, they float like a memory and a story, but they approach the moment.

Stories of exchanges. Guignard’s transcultural construction of the landscapes: China-ism, Japanism the atmospheric perspective of the European Renaissance. quotes from van Eyck in Ghent, of the Battle of Alexandre in Issus by Albrecht Altdorfer, the solidarity of Grünewald, the Leonardoesque sfumato, the capriccio, an angel by Rembrandt and the romantic vision of the cosmos of Humboldt. Indians populate Cristo em baldaquim [Christ in baldachin] and a black Christ emerges in indices of anthropophagy. It is as if, in Guignard, the world was a face of Brazil.

Three eruditions

Katie van Scherpenberg and José Maria Dias da Cruz proposed an erudite discussion on colour at the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage in the 1980s, where Cristina Canale studied.

For Katie van Scherpenberg, landscape was the device to re-problemise colour. An oxidised landscape by the German painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880) in her parents' home offered the mineral tone, which impregnated her dry landscapes of solvent-free pigments. In the exhibition Rio vermelho [Red Rio] (1983), the gallery is painted in red and houses paintings in the same colour, with green traces. Jardim vermelho [Red garden] covers the lawn with red soil/iron oxide. Under the furtivity of the germination and photosynthesis, the fluorescent painting, because the garden is alive, and it responds to the invigorating force of the light-energy. The red territory is repainted with green grass. The painter alludes to the death of the painting: “death is something material and the painting, because it is a visual thought, produces memories, discussions, history, culture and roots”.

The work of José Maria Dias da Cruz forks at the theory of colour (through the legibility of the chromatic construction of the pictorial surface) and image (even in its historic cut). Despite his verbal discourse on painting, the artist’s colour is not the pure philosophical

concept of Wittgenstein, but a sensorial erudition in his own key. His mark is the sensitive knowledge that passed from Goethe and others to Cézanne, before landing, in a personal language, on the visible surface.

Cristina Canale's painting, however hesitant it may seem, is more decided in form and colour. The artist is capable of displacing intuitions, the libertarian improvisations and density of studies at Parque Lage, for high academic debates of German painting in Düsseldorf. After this experience between systems of training, her work built a sensorial freshness, a lightness of colour, an apparent ambulation of the contour of forms between the ambivalences of the formless and enunciation of references, the lack of loquacity to inquire about what Entre o ser e as coisas [Between beings and things] has, if not the poetic rumour of language.

Erudition and the experimental in two teachers

Katie van Scherpenberg and José Maria Dias da Cruz proposed an erudite discussion about colour at the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage in the 1980s. For her, landscape is the tool to re-problemise colour. An oxidised canvas by the German painter Anselm Feurbach (1829-1880) offered the mineral tone that impregnated her dry solvent-free pigment landscapes. In the exhibition Rio vermelho [Red river] (1983), the gallery is painted in red and houses paintings in the same colour, with green traces. The painter alludes to the life and death of the painting: “death is something material and the painting, because it is a visual thought, produces memories, discussions, history, culture and roots”. The work of Dias da Cruz forks at the theory of colour (through the legibility of the chromatic construction of the pictorial surface) and image (even in its historical cut). Despite his verbal discourse on painting, the colour of the artist is not the pure philosophical concept of Wittgenstein, but a sensorial erudition in his own key. Its poetic is the sensitive knowledge that passed from Goethe and others to Cézanne, until landing, in a personal language, on the visible surface.

Jorge Guinle

When painting regained its prestige at the start of the 1980s, Jorge Guinle (1947-1987) emerged as a vigorous artist, alongside Flavio-Shiró and Iberê Camargo. Older than his fellow beginners, who rocked the Escola de Artes Visuais in Parque Lage, Guinle was a generous and available reference as a mature painter. Discreet, he never believed in heroes in art, because his energy was the painting itself. With him, the colour of Brazil emancipated from rational concepts and comments about reality. Only the axis of colour/painting is real in the gaze that he built. His work was a sun in the moment of the political opening after the military dictatorship.

Afro-Brazil

The slavery of Africans marks the violent history of the founding of Brazil, with consequences nowadays. How could one escape from the status of homo sacer? A subject

outside the field of effective legal protection, like the slave was. The experience of banishment from Africa in the Americas was a time of fractures with no return (Saúl Karsz). The re-composition of the socio-cultural system, like in Palmares, and religious and cultural manifestations were forms of resistance in exile. African music crossed Brazil, from the excellency of Father José Mauricio Nunes Garcia, master of Capela Real, to Pixinguinha, a fundamental figure in popular music. Machado de Assis, the great Brazilian writer, Cruz e Souza or Lima Barreto, modern even before modernism, point to the formation of Brazil through a discourse of the subject outside the structure of the domination of slavery. According to Germain Bazain, Aleijadinho was the greatest sculptor in the Americas in the colonial period. A carver and urbanist, Mestre Valentim introduced great changes to the Rio of the vice-royalty. In the empire and in the republic, black artists imposed themselves on every vicissitude: Estêvão Silva, the Timótheo da Costa brothers, and Di Cavalcanti, nephew of abolitionist José do Patrocínio. In the post-war period, the rigorous concretist Almir Mavignier graduated in Ulm, Germany, with Max Bill.

The constructive Rubem Valentim proposed a Brazilian riskiness, a writing that converted the symbology of the Orisha gods of Candomblé, and the risked points of the Umbanda religion, into significant plastic spiritual values. His historic task was to deconstruct the relegation that surrounded the symbolic representation of black people, in which their religious forms were treated as a matter for the police, superstition, folklore and pure ethnological objects. Emanoel Araújo appeared close to Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethânia, his contemporaries from Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia. The artist’s refined constructive woodcuts bloomed in dialogue with the then contemporary Africa, under the impact of a visit that he made to the continent. His Africa Suite operates a material economy of colour, with the fracture of the objective form written by symbolic colour and the semantic infiltration of Iorubá culture. If for Manuel Messias, another black artist, the resultant wood is the soul, for Araújo it is the body, the trauma in folds of domination. Other black artists to mention are: Milton Ribeiro, Heitor dos Prazeres, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Mestre Didi, Raimundo de Oliveira, Walter Firmo, M. L. Magliani, Jayme Fygura, Rosana Paulino, Jaime Lauriano, Paulo Nazareth, Ayrson Heráclito, Arjan Martins and Helô Sanvoy.

Brasilia, colourless memory

What is the memory of colour in a new city? During the period of Juscelino Kubitschek’s government (1956-1961), when Brasilia was built, painting had very little iconographic meaning in the country. The prevalent photography was in black and white, colour photos faded and the quality of reproduction in the press was low. The red dust of the treeless plains was impregnated in the asphalt and the white marble of the buildings. The invention of Brasilia, in its passing from black and white to colour, confronted photographs with a painting by Milton Ribeiro, a student of Guignard and an artistic Candango, a pioneer of artistic teaching in Novacap, at the Universidade de Brasília, founded by Anísio Teixeira, Darcy Ribeiro and others.

The multiple and the multiplier

He was a man dedicated to diversifying his practices - that which was to some people a stylistic instability, was experienced by Ivan Serpa as a evasion of the styling, that turned an artwork into a product wrapped in a style that was desired by the consumer. Serpa gave himself the right to be an artist in his own style: eclectic and varied, but focussed, and never amateur; experimental and demanding, intense and perfectionist. He lived back and forth between the mesh of modernity and the revocation by the political ghosts of the Black phase - the horror! The horror! - and erotics. The absence of colour compounded the mourning, exposing the imaginary of the terrorism of the State. He considered green ecology in Amazonia, green and pink in Mangueira. The fluid trace escaped into nervous scribbles that were incorporated in vibrant and warm colours of desire. Serpa attached transparencies, reframed letters, organised beetle holes, disconcerted rhythmic harmony colours, moved circles, freed animals and humans, risked semantic leaps. He even used brown! – Waldemar Cordeiro accused him of violating the concretist law of restricting colours to the primaries and secondaries. He was generous, a professor of a unique art, because among his students were Aluísio Carvão, Décio Vieira, João José da Costa, Rubem Ludolf, César e Hélio Oiticica, Evany Fanzeres, Waltercio Caldas, Paulo Garcez, Emil Forman, Ana Vitória Mussi and others. On Sundays, he would open up his home in Méier to other artists for discussions about art. He was demanding. He expected a lot of production from his students between one class and the next, as must have been the case with Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas series. He wanted an intensity from the young artist until there was a confluence from a single decision in the brain, from a sensitive perception, of the will for language and the body itself.

Lasar Segall

Lasar Segall was the painter of ethos. Everything was based on the ethical density of solid artwork. His paintings Kaddish and Os eternos caminhantes [The eternal walkers] deal with eschatology (the final destination of things), losses, the diaspora, the pogroms. Sombre and vigorously melancholic paintings – it was imperative to light up the hopelessness – they were doomed to execration by Reich as degenerate art. An immigrant, Segall bid farewell to his ex-wife, representing himself as a mulatto to symbolise his adoption of Brazil. He painted black people toiling in the fields, organising nature through their work. He affirmed the work-ethic of Afro-descendants. Madonna lives in a favela, Morro vermelho [Red hill], which has the shape of the bow of Navio de emigrantes [Emigrant ship]; two situations from the ethics of hope – exclusion and the refuge where slavery did riches. Segall now articulates social exclusion and Holocaust. To him, it has been said, Jews and Black people are races in diaspora. And his painting never stays silent.

Livro da criação [The book of creation]

“’What is the meaning of a book’, thought Alice, 'without images or dialogues?’” Without words, Livro da criação [The book of creation] by Lygia Pape is the post-book in 14 pages: “I put my meanings in a significant-base (the form of the page) that at the same time both guide my feelings and become enriched with them”. The water comes from semi-circular

cuts that mark the start of the world as the history of man, the geometry: 1. After the waters got lower, lower, lower and lower.

Livro da criação [The book of creation] and Genesis by Mira Schendel oppose the non-verbal with the verbal, history and Sacred Scriptures, immanence and transcendence, materialism and metaphysics. In Livro da criação [The book of creation], when light is made, colour is invented. 2. The man started to mark the time. The route of the stars is the time of the mechanics of the cosmos. The subject and their consciousness of time: life and death. Homo sapiens appear. 3. Man discovered fire. Science is born. 4. Man was a nomad hunter. Technique is born. 5. In the forest. The language is the forest of signs.

To Ferreira Gullar, “the name of things is under the things”; in Lygia Pape, they get rid of the name. 6. Man was gregarious and sowed the land. The metaphor of art as a trajectory of light and sowing. The cubist mesh sows the colour into space and the emptiness into the being. 7. And the land flowers. The harvest blooms neo-concretist colours in garden state (Clarice Lispector). 8. Man invented the wheel. Enhancing the body. 9. Man discovered the planetary system. To be in the world is to be understood in the universe because 10. The earth was round and rotated on its own axis. The notion of the cosmos. 11. Keel navigates in time. The diaspora. 12. Stilt House. Le Corbusier. It is the fold of the primal shelter. The stilt house is the stilt of the modern architecture of Le Corbusier. 13. Submarine – The hollow is full under the water. Submarine. The hollow is full under the water. It is the boat without Moby Dick, but with Joyce. It is war. 14. Light. Synthesis of the work by Lygia Pape herself. The book without verb, circular time in the squareness of the circle, infinite.

Concretism. The basis for concretism in São Paulo, the Manifesto Ruptura [Ruptured Manifesto] (1952), advocated the pre-viewable of the “pure visuality” of the German philosopher Konrad Fiedler and Theo Van Doesburg's Art Concrete Manifesto (1930). The concretism of Waldemar Cordeiro imposed the objectivity of geometry, control of material (the elimination of every trace of the brush, like in industrial aesthetics), and the art of signs, a restricted colour program (primaries and secondaries). Mário Pedrosa called the concretist painter a painting machine and Décio Pignatari lamented at not incorporating chance. Despite the canon, differences erupted. “A change was taking place in society”, says Judith Lauand, an artist of the semantic dispersion of colour on fabric. Hermelindo Fiaminghi fought to escape the weight of Max Bill until he understood the potential of reticulated graphical colour and the idea of light-colour. Rigorous, Alexandre Wollner was confronted between designer and graphic painter. The clumsy scale of Lothar Charoux and Maurício Nogueira Lima matures in the Lexicon Op of the reduction of colour to graphic contrast. Cosmopolitan, Geraldo de Barros was always experimental. His Fotoformas [Photoforms] are an epistemological cut of photography as knowledge. His painting articulated the visual games of gestalt that renewed interrogations of the gaze, like in the pair of paintings in which the weight of primary colours differs in the circles and the squares, despite identical structures. Luiz Sacilotto, experimental in a form articulated by colour, opens up for materials and reliefs – challenging the surface stabilised by crises. In Waldemar Cordeiro, the painted geometry evolves to the concept of the visible idea, the productive relationship between art and the philosophy of Fiedler, with reduced focus on the affective and symbolic dimensions of colour. Reviewing it considers light and the computer. A Gramscian utoptista, Cordeiro confronts the contradiction of appreciating pop,

despite symbolising capitalism. His answer is the popcreto. In the current world, he affirms, “The methods of production and communication should be the same for everyone, everywhere”. Light-objects. The work of art, understood as an autonomous object, overcomes the condition of category (from painting to sculpture) in approximation to these works. In Abraham Palatnik’s object, the work is a machine that explores the impalpable of the light, crossing its definition in physics and unfolding into movements of colour-light. It is a worldwide pioneer of kinetic art (from the Greek kinesis, movement). The projected movements appear to dissolve and shuffle the separation of the colours of the rainbow and, even in its slowness, it alludes to the speed of light, a cosmic measurement of distance.

The painting of Almir Mavignier results from a method: paint is spread directly from its tube to leave small circles of colour. The junction of these circles and the control of colour produce images, such as the crosshairs of the printing of photographs in certain moments of industrial graphics. Here, this accumulation surprises through the analytic unfolding of the spectrum of light.

To Waldemar Cordeiro, the exhaustion of geometric art led the artist to the challenge of structuring the spectrum of light in the form of meshes, like a chessboard of colours in painting. The compliment, in Brazilian art, is the neo-concrete words of Osmar Dillon, in which light is the material of the signifier, like in the writing of the word Colour, the act of Matisse com talco [Matisse with talc], by Waltercio Caldas, and Desvio para o vermelho [Detour to red], by Cildo Meireles.

Abstraction: Iberê and his master

The pioneer in the practice of non-figurative art in Brazil was Manoel Santiago, with paintings linked to theosophy, like O pensamento de Deus no absoluto [The thought of God in the absolute] (1920). Antonio Bandeira was an experimental abstract. His methods investigated supports (straw, polystyrene, biscuit), runoff and ink stamps, as traces of the remains of the world in the abstract image, a semantic clash between significant and signified.

In the 1950s, a generation of Japanese-Brazilian painters appeared with brushstrokes of a calligraphic extraction. Manabu Mabe painted ideograms, such as the farewell in Sayonara. and Tomie Ohtake painted blindfolded, because the purpose was to deliver the experience of painting time and not the conquest of space. The painting was the time that passes in Zen-Buddhism. Flavio-Shiró, who spent his childhood in the Amazon and later went on to divide his time between France and Brazil, used a brushstroke that united three worlds: the memory of the snow and the ideogramatic calligraphy of Japan; the roots, lianas, marshes and insects of the Amazon; and the gestures of French art.

At the end of the 1950s, Iberê Camargo was still a hesitant and intellectually conservative artist in relation to modernity and, above all, did not take risks in his process of maturing regarding ideas of abstract art. He certainly saw Shiró’s exhibition at MAM in Rio in 1959, in which he may have discovered painting that was calligraphic (the ideogram that Iberê transformed into signs), gesticular (the broad gesture demanding wider surfaces), with paint formed on the canvas (and not on the palette), painting in whole arm movements (not only

with the wrist) and paint formed on the canvas with colours picked from the background of the pictorial mass gamble. In this sense, Shiró was a master to Iberê.

Antonio Dias, Oswaldo Goeldi and Artur Barrio

Oswaldo Goeldi was an exemplary artist, who the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade described as the prevalence of the moral night on the physical night. An artist of the melancholy of the modern urban man, Goeldi was the model of austerity as an artist, with predominately vigorous cut in the wooden matrix and, almost always, reducing the eventual inclusion of colour to red. Carlos Zilio classed him as the Other in modernism, outside the musical band of the avant-gardes.

Antonio Dias built a singular system of colour, which, because he never referred to a model, was complex in its criteria. Colour is something that is requested by language, by the material meaning of its discourse, by the relationship between manufacturing and work, by violence, and by the amplitude of its human geography. At one point, the palette of Dias had something of the work of Goeldi, his professor, in it. In the 1960s, Hélio Oiticica considered Dias’ work to be a political and aesthetical turning point in Brazilian art.

During the dictatorship, Artur Barrio was a restless artist. His bundles, paintings padded with a variety of objects made from blood, skins and absorbents, proposed a stripped down aesthetic. Dropped at random, these bundles, which imitated “hams” (bodies of people executed by the civil or political police), attracted curiosity and comments regarding the violence of the State.