...........................................................................................
YVES ROSSY: A Presença Do Desenho Voador
...........................................................................................
ALOYSIO ZALUAR: The Design Of Peripheral Life
Guilherme Preger
A singular encounter is offered by the new exposition of Aloysio Zaluar in Basel, Switzerland. This casual statement hides the power of an event able to unfold itself in unexpectable lines of affectivity and intelligence. Near 150 new drawings of his more recent production mark the original presence of this great Brazilian artist in European territory, opening a virtual space of celebration among different nations, suggesting subterranean links between them, in an art center dedicated to cultural meetings beyond physical and spiritual frontiers.
The exposition presents a graphic reunion of recent works on drawings which make a synthesis of near 50 years of the artistic achievement of Aloysio Zaluar. These years mean a life of work dedicated to research and to register the popular and cultural manifestations from ordinary life in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil, giving special attention to the peripherals expressions from marginalized people. He is the painter of dense drawings, from unexpected forms and bright colors that populated the collective Brazilian imaginary and which are expressed in the strange clothes and in the masquerade of the “Clovis” (carnival figure that uses a colored frightful mask), in the allegorical adornments of the street carnival, in the rich diversity of tropical nature, in the gesture of the “capoeiras” (street martial fighters from colonization period) and “malandros”, all of them constant subjects of his paintings. His work, heir of popular expressionism, illuminates a manifold imaginary that insists in keeping alive, although marginalized and forgotten.
Born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, son of a liberal humanist doctor, his family, Zaluar became notable in the cultural scene of the city. He had studied in the traditional Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Beaux Arts) where he received a gold medal, the same degree of a Master of Art. He was a disciple of Oswaldo Goeldi, a famous Swiss Brazilian artist, son of the notable Swiss natural scientist Emil August Goeldi who had founded one of the most important naturalist museums in Brazil, in the city of Belem. In his strictly humanist work, Oswaldo Goeldi became one of the greatest Brazilian visual artists of all time and have stimulated in Aloysio Zaluar special interest for expressionist aesthetics and for the techniques of engravings in stone and metal.
AZ has been always an engaged artist, worried about the political implications of his work. He participated in the active student movement in the end of the 50´s which defended at the time the politicization of art and the turning to popular culture. He helped in the foundation of the seminal Macunaíma Gallery, a famous site of popular culture. In the 60´s he participated in the street decoration for the carnival in Rio de Janeiro. He also founded the academic chair of engraving and design in the Beaux Arts School of Santa Maria da Boca do Monte in south Brazil, “Escolinha de Arte Girassol”, a school of art for children in Rio de Janeiro and the famous “Oficina de Arte Popular”, an office of popular arts and crafts specialized in the production of technical images based on engraving.
In the beginning of the 60´s, AZ was investigating the life forms of beggars who lived in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Influenced by Goya, Ensor and Goeldi, he pictured the miserable daily life of these mendicants and their tactics of survival. These series of pictures and engravings led to his first individual exposition in the galleries of Rio. After that, he participated in the National Salon of Modern Art, with his trilogy of “Macunaíma”, one of his most important works of art, which express the anthropophagic ability of the Brazilian people, specialist in the creative art of surviving. This series of paintings synthesizes the intense debates led by the artists of his generation about the destiny of the project of nationality which was deranged by the military dictatorship installed in 1964.
Persecuted and imprisoned by the military dictatorship, AZ took refuge in a bucolic site in Pedra de Guaratiba in the surroundings of Rio de Janeiro, where he made contact with genuine popular culture. There he observed those strange and peculiar masquerade figures of the Clovis who frighten the streets in the nights of carnival. He started a visual research about this theme and made a series of paintings, drawings and super-8 films which were exhibited in art galleries and in the National salons, for example, the Latin America Biannual of Arts in 1978. The exposition “O Clovis vem aí” (Clovis is coming) had left the painter notorious in the scene of contemporaneous art. This stage of his work represents the core of his personal reflections about the popular forms of expressions, in their material and symbolic manifestations. For Zaluar, the phantasmagoric fantasies of the Clovis are not only the true heirs of the Iberian traditional culture, but also they suggest a collective unconscious that embodies fine impressions of larger social context. AZ named these impressions “Psychosocial images”. Colorful rich, their extravagant bright and weighed clothes are an example of the popular capacity of creating aesthetically with few resources.
In this same decade, AZ begun to research the fascinate universe of the big fire balloons released by the peripheral communities of Rio de Janeiro. Fire balloons represent a tradition brought from China to Europe by Marco Polo. It was practiced as an entertainment by European aristocracy in the XVII and XIX centuries as in Napoleon court. In Rio’s suburban and poor communities it was (and continues to be) an art persecuted by the police as a dangerous practice. Its fabrication engages the work of all the community during months. In the inflated tissue of the huge balloon were woven colorful icons from mass culture or other symbols from popular culture. The releasing event was accompanied by a great and happy festivity. At the time, AZ used to photograph and film these events, gathering visual material which was transformed in the rich drawings of his paintings, preserving the exuberant beauty of those impressive flying objects.
In the middle of the 70’s, he made contact with a community of descendents of Swiss immigrant people in Muri, a German Swiss village in the mountainous surroundings of Rio de Janeiro. This community preserved native cultural rituals that impressed the artist. He documented his sojourn with many photographs. In this exposition AZ does homage to those affective reminiscent images captured in that encounter.
In the 80’s, AZ moved to Saquarema, a small town by the sea, where he explored native and bucolic themes from rural and shore landscapes. Specially, he documented the rich live collections of birds in that place, registering the diversity of birds’ colors and chants. He also participated in collective expositions about the theme of Soccer, one of his dearest passions. He continued to focus on carnival subjects, painting the mobs in the frenzy transport of the carnival festivity, where heterogeneous elements from national culture were mixed, combining Clovis, soccer players, dancers from the schools of samba, televisions stars and all different icons from mass culture like comics heroes and monsters from animated cartoons.
In the beginning of the 90’s, AZ was doing iconographic research in a famous place of popular commerce in the historical center area of Rio de Janeiro, named “Saara”. This research resulted in the exposition “Saara: Vitrine do Real” (Saara: The Real Shopping-Window) where assemblages of drawings and objects showed how the industrial formats of mass communication used in popular artifacts have aesthetical expressions and are able to create unforeseen languages and meanings.
Also in the 90’s, AZ had a strong interest in the traditional culture of the “capoeira” mobs, with their ancient fights and street games, an old practice of the urban history of Rio de Janeiro. Following the example of the great Brazilians caricature illustrators of the beginning of the XX century who invented modern Brazilian cartoons, he worked on the series “Malta Ilustrada” (Illustrated Mob), introducing the style of caricatures with strong contrasting colors and the technique of assemblage to portrait effusive scenes of street culture, mixing capoeira games to samba dances, and figures like “malandros” and “mulatas” to typical characters of mass culture.
In the series “Desenho: Estrutura Multiforme de Todas as Coisas” (Design: Manifold Structure of All Things) AZ developed a rigorous reflection about the social function of design understood as an essential language of immediate communication that unites all symbolic manifestations of culture. In the name of this idea, his work achieved a fundamental convergence between popular handmade process and the modern technological audiovisual procedures. In doing so, his art surpasses the frontiers between High art, and popular and mass culture. Nowadays, AZ still develops projects that prolongate his reflections about culture values in relation with the modern resources of informatics society.
Despite the indisputable aesthetic value of his work, AZ always considered himself an observer rather than an artist, whose mission is to register, with the means acquired in years of artistic practice, the anonymous collective forms of expression and creation, relating them with the daily struggle for survival of the poorest classes. In the name of this ideal, he was in the 70’s one of the pioneers in the use of the concept of “visual anthropology”. Visual anthropology aims to trace, by means of social and aesthetic research, the invisible lines that organize the cultural production of the excluded classes. So, his work tries to capture the indiscernible features of the psychosocial imaginary which present themselves in the immaterial ways of doing and enjoying the carnival, playing the capoeira or fabricating manually artworks so as to translate them in the iconographic strokes of his dense paintbrushes.
Following this anthropological view, AZ aims to abandon the auratic role of the “visual artist” (one of his expositions was just entitled “The Last Painter”) for the social function of the “mediator”, the one who is concerned to furnish the means for the creation of encounters for social recognition using the powers of his plastic capacities of art design. In these encounters, the possible relationships compose in the social environment the striking living features of lines and colors that later will inhabit his canvas. In the period of “Illustrated Mob”, AZ promoted the reunion of old masters of capoeira from different places to participate in the street games of this Brazilian ancient fight. While those masters play the games and enjoyed themselves, AZ drew his caricatures and paintings, restoring an old tradition of illustrated narrative, registering for the posterity an immaterial patrimony that is kept alive and kicking.
Actually, during the trajectory of five decades, AZ had assumed a decisive option to insert in his drawings, in his colors, in his forms, a positive energy that emanates from the everyday living conditions of the Brazilian people. This energy is generated in the very materiality of their lives, almost consumed in the prosaic struggle for survival, a daily battle against the oppression caused by the historical inequality of Brazilian society. When productively channeled, this hidden energy explodes in multiple creative manifestations which compose the manifold Brazilian culture, in particular, from Rio de Janeiro. Then it empowers the work of AZ who searches with his own body in the most forgotten territories where the collective vitality takes refuge. There he finds the transpiring creative movements which are documented with all the possible technologies of contemporaneous visual communication.
This exposition in Basel is composed integrally by recent drawings, almost all of them black and white. They build a rich panel of all the visual elements that populated the work of AZ in the last 50 years. They are the effort led by the artist, in these last times, to synthesize the diverse figurative subjects that inhabit his imagination through a creative work of remembrance. The focus on fine synthesis led AZ to basic design with pen or pencil, by which he tries rapid and nervous drawings, strong black traces representing frenetic lines of the collective fantasy. They give shape to well known figures of his paintings, like the cited Clovis, capoeiras, samba dancers and balloons mixed to famous characters of today’s public culture like the president of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the famous soccer player Ronaldinho, or famous actresses or Brazilian top models. In addition to these figures, there are also presented images of his immediate perception, flashes from his ordinary life, and portraits of people from his personal relations as well as homage to Oswaldo Goeldi and to those immigrant people from the Swiss village in Muri. He joins these graphic images to small recent notes and photographs from magazines and newspapers in a kind of “visual annotations”, resulting in a collage of heterogeneous references, seemingly aleatory arranged, but which actually interact themselves energetically in the blank space of the pages.
“Collage” is a very technical word to these mixed drawings. A more appropriate word is “Encounter”, because it translates the mediating function of the artist in this imaginative universe. In each of these works, AZ pretends to create a possibility of an unusual but viable encounter – the construction of a simultaneous pictorial and social space, where the human design converges with graphic design, this last one being not the reflection of the former but its development, its unfolding in colors and lines; and vice-versa, human design tracing with gestures and lights a spatial writing of social relations. His task as an artist has been to give visibility to those communicating lines that compose the social tissue of Brazilian culture. And more than that: making it visible and accessible: near the hand that draws, the action that links and the participation that unites.
These are the line of flights of the social designs which trace the reality of the Brazilian “Lebenswelt” in continuous change. These designs are the true circuits of energy by which flow the human interaction and affective exchange. They are the channels of symbolic communication, the sanguineous wires from the cultural sphere which links human diversity giving life to a multiplicity of concrete shapes. In a moment of social distress and hard life, the artist captures an excess of the collective fantasy which the famous Frankfurter critic Ernst Bloch called “utopian surplus”. It is this one repressed by the utilitarian mentality of capitalist society but which insist in resistance by shining in the extemporaneous figurative encounters of the work of Aloysio Zaluar.
Guilherme Preger has a Master´s degree in Brazilian Literature by the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He is a poet, author of “Capoeiragem (published in 2003). He wrote the unpublished essay “O Último Pintor” (The Last Painter) about the work of art of Aloysio Zaluar.
The exposition presents a graphic reunion of recent works on drawings which make a synthesis of near 50 years of the artistic achievement of Aloysio Zaluar. These years mean a life of work dedicated to research and to register the popular and cultural manifestations from ordinary life in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil, giving special attention to the peripherals expressions from marginalized people. He is the painter of dense drawings, from unexpected forms and bright colors that populated the collective Brazilian imaginary and which are expressed in the strange clothes and in the masquerade of the “Clovis” (carnival figure that uses a colored frightful mask), in the allegorical adornments of the street carnival, in the rich diversity of tropical nature, in the gesture of the “capoeiras” (street martial fighters from colonization period) and “malandros”, all of them constant subjects of his paintings. His work, heir of popular expressionism, illuminates a manifold imaginary that insists in keeping alive, although marginalized and forgotten.
Born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, son of a liberal humanist doctor, his family, Zaluar became notable in the cultural scene of the city. He had studied in the traditional Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Beaux Arts) where he received a gold medal, the same degree of a Master of Art. He was a disciple of Oswaldo Goeldi, a famous Swiss Brazilian artist, son of the notable Swiss natural scientist Emil August Goeldi who had founded one of the most important naturalist museums in Brazil, in the city of Belem. In his strictly humanist work, Oswaldo Goeldi became one of the greatest Brazilian visual artists of all time and have stimulated in Aloysio Zaluar special interest for expressionist aesthetics and for the techniques of engravings in stone and metal.
AZ has been always an engaged artist, worried about the political implications of his work. He participated in the active student movement in the end of the 50´s which defended at the time the politicization of art and the turning to popular culture. He helped in the foundation of the seminal Macunaíma Gallery, a famous site of popular culture. In the 60´s he participated in the street decoration for the carnival in Rio de Janeiro. He also founded the academic chair of engraving and design in the Beaux Arts School of Santa Maria da Boca do Monte in south Brazil, “Escolinha de Arte Girassol”, a school of art for children in Rio de Janeiro and the famous “Oficina de Arte Popular”, an office of popular arts and crafts specialized in the production of technical images based on engraving.
In the beginning of the 60´s, AZ was investigating the life forms of beggars who lived in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Influenced by Goya, Ensor and Goeldi, he pictured the miserable daily life of these mendicants and their tactics of survival. These series of pictures and engravings led to his first individual exposition in the galleries of Rio. After that, he participated in the National Salon of Modern Art, with his trilogy of “Macunaíma”, one of his most important works of art, which express the anthropophagic ability of the Brazilian people, specialist in the creative art of surviving. This series of paintings synthesizes the intense debates led by the artists of his generation about the destiny of the project of nationality which was deranged by the military dictatorship installed in 1964.
Persecuted and imprisoned by the military dictatorship, AZ took refuge in a bucolic site in Pedra de Guaratiba in the surroundings of Rio de Janeiro, where he made contact with genuine popular culture. There he observed those strange and peculiar masquerade figures of the Clovis who frighten the streets in the nights of carnival. He started a visual research about this theme and made a series of paintings, drawings and super-8 films which were exhibited in art galleries and in the National salons, for example, the Latin America Biannual of Arts in 1978. The exposition “O Clovis vem aí” (Clovis is coming) had left the painter notorious in the scene of contemporaneous art. This stage of his work represents the core of his personal reflections about the popular forms of expressions, in their material and symbolic manifestations. For Zaluar, the phantasmagoric fantasies of the Clovis are not only the true heirs of the Iberian traditional culture, but also they suggest a collective unconscious that embodies fine impressions of larger social context. AZ named these impressions “Psychosocial images”. Colorful rich, their extravagant bright and weighed clothes are an example of the popular capacity of creating aesthetically with few resources.
In this same decade, AZ begun to research the fascinate universe of the big fire balloons released by the peripheral communities of Rio de Janeiro. Fire balloons represent a tradition brought from China to Europe by Marco Polo. It was practiced as an entertainment by European aristocracy in the XVII and XIX centuries as in Napoleon court. In Rio’s suburban and poor communities it was (and continues to be) an art persecuted by the police as a dangerous practice. Its fabrication engages the work of all the community during months. In the inflated tissue of the huge balloon were woven colorful icons from mass culture or other symbols from popular culture. The releasing event was accompanied by a great and happy festivity. At the time, AZ used to photograph and film these events, gathering visual material which was transformed in the rich drawings of his paintings, preserving the exuberant beauty of those impressive flying objects.
In the middle of the 70’s, he made contact with a community of descendents of Swiss immigrant people in Muri, a German Swiss village in the mountainous surroundings of Rio de Janeiro. This community preserved native cultural rituals that impressed the artist. He documented his sojourn with many photographs. In this exposition AZ does homage to those affective reminiscent images captured in that encounter.
In the 80’s, AZ moved to Saquarema, a small town by the sea, where he explored native and bucolic themes from rural and shore landscapes. Specially, he documented the rich live collections of birds in that place, registering the diversity of birds’ colors and chants. He also participated in collective expositions about the theme of Soccer, one of his dearest passions. He continued to focus on carnival subjects, painting the mobs in the frenzy transport of the carnival festivity, where heterogeneous elements from national culture were mixed, combining Clovis, soccer players, dancers from the schools of samba, televisions stars and all different icons from mass culture like comics heroes and monsters from animated cartoons.
In the beginning of the 90’s, AZ was doing iconographic research in a famous place of popular commerce in the historical center area of Rio de Janeiro, named “Saara”. This research resulted in the exposition “Saara: Vitrine do Real” (Saara: The Real Shopping-Window) where assemblages of drawings and objects showed how the industrial formats of mass communication used in popular artifacts have aesthetical expressions and are able to create unforeseen languages and meanings.
Also in the 90’s, AZ had a strong interest in the traditional culture of the “capoeira” mobs, with their ancient fights and street games, an old practice of the urban history of Rio de Janeiro. Following the example of the great Brazilians caricature illustrators of the beginning of the XX century who invented modern Brazilian cartoons, he worked on the series “Malta Ilustrada” (Illustrated Mob), introducing the style of caricatures with strong contrasting colors and the technique of assemblage to portrait effusive scenes of street culture, mixing capoeira games to samba dances, and figures like “malandros” and “mulatas” to typical characters of mass culture.
In the series “Desenho: Estrutura Multiforme de Todas as Coisas” (Design: Manifold Structure of All Things) AZ developed a rigorous reflection about the social function of design understood as an essential language of immediate communication that unites all symbolic manifestations of culture. In the name of this idea, his work achieved a fundamental convergence between popular handmade process and the modern technological audiovisual procedures. In doing so, his art surpasses the frontiers between High art, and popular and mass culture. Nowadays, AZ still develops projects that prolongate his reflections about culture values in relation with the modern resources of informatics society.
Despite the indisputable aesthetic value of his work, AZ always considered himself an observer rather than an artist, whose mission is to register, with the means acquired in years of artistic practice, the anonymous collective forms of expression and creation, relating them with the daily struggle for survival of the poorest classes. In the name of this ideal, he was in the 70’s one of the pioneers in the use of the concept of “visual anthropology”. Visual anthropology aims to trace, by means of social and aesthetic research, the invisible lines that organize the cultural production of the excluded classes. So, his work tries to capture the indiscernible features of the psychosocial imaginary which present themselves in the immaterial ways of doing and enjoying the carnival, playing the capoeira or fabricating manually artworks so as to translate them in the iconographic strokes of his dense paintbrushes.
Following this anthropological view, AZ aims to abandon the auratic role of the “visual artist” (one of his expositions was just entitled “The Last Painter”) for the social function of the “mediator”, the one who is concerned to furnish the means for the creation of encounters for social recognition using the powers of his plastic capacities of art design. In these encounters, the possible relationships compose in the social environment the striking living features of lines and colors that later will inhabit his canvas. In the period of “Illustrated Mob”, AZ promoted the reunion of old masters of capoeira from different places to participate in the street games of this Brazilian ancient fight. While those masters play the games and enjoyed themselves, AZ drew his caricatures and paintings, restoring an old tradition of illustrated narrative, registering for the posterity an immaterial patrimony that is kept alive and kicking.
Actually, during the trajectory of five decades, AZ had assumed a decisive option to insert in his drawings, in his colors, in his forms, a positive energy that emanates from the everyday living conditions of the Brazilian people. This energy is generated in the very materiality of their lives, almost consumed in the prosaic struggle for survival, a daily battle against the oppression caused by the historical inequality of Brazilian society. When productively channeled, this hidden energy explodes in multiple creative manifestations which compose the manifold Brazilian culture, in particular, from Rio de Janeiro. Then it empowers the work of AZ who searches with his own body in the most forgotten territories where the collective vitality takes refuge. There he finds the transpiring creative movements which are documented with all the possible technologies of contemporaneous visual communication.
This exposition in Basel is composed integrally by recent drawings, almost all of them black and white. They build a rich panel of all the visual elements that populated the work of AZ in the last 50 years. They are the effort led by the artist, in these last times, to synthesize the diverse figurative subjects that inhabit his imagination through a creative work of remembrance. The focus on fine synthesis led AZ to basic design with pen or pencil, by which he tries rapid and nervous drawings, strong black traces representing frenetic lines of the collective fantasy. They give shape to well known figures of his paintings, like the cited Clovis, capoeiras, samba dancers and balloons mixed to famous characters of today’s public culture like the president of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the famous soccer player Ronaldinho, or famous actresses or Brazilian top models. In addition to these figures, there are also presented images of his immediate perception, flashes from his ordinary life, and portraits of people from his personal relations as well as homage to Oswaldo Goeldi and to those immigrant people from the Swiss village in Muri. He joins these graphic images to small recent notes and photographs from magazines and newspapers in a kind of “visual annotations”, resulting in a collage of heterogeneous references, seemingly aleatory arranged, but which actually interact themselves energetically in the blank space of the pages.
“Collage” is a very technical word to these mixed drawings. A more appropriate word is “Encounter”, because it translates the mediating function of the artist in this imaginative universe. In each of these works, AZ pretends to create a possibility of an unusual but viable encounter – the construction of a simultaneous pictorial and social space, where the human design converges with graphic design, this last one being not the reflection of the former but its development, its unfolding in colors and lines; and vice-versa, human design tracing with gestures and lights a spatial writing of social relations. His task as an artist has been to give visibility to those communicating lines that compose the social tissue of Brazilian culture. And more than that: making it visible and accessible: near the hand that draws, the action that links and the participation that unites.
These are the line of flights of the social designs which trace the reality of the Brazilian “Lebenswelt” in continuous change. These designs are the true circuits of energy by which flow the human interaction and affective exchange. They are the channels of symbolic communication, the sanguineous wires from the cultural sphere which links human diversity giving life to a multiplicity of concrete shapes. In a moment of social distress and hard life, the artist captures an excess of the collective fantasy which the famous Frankfurter critic Ernst Bloch called “utopian surplus”. It is this one repressed by the utilitarian mentality of capitalist society but which insist in resistance by shining in the extemporaneous figurative encounters of the work of Aloysio Zaluar.
Guilherme Preger has a Master´s degree in Brazilian Literature by the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He is a poet, author of “Capoeiragem (published in 2003). He wrote the unpublished essay “O Último Pintor” (The Last Painter) about the work of art of Aloysio Zaluar.
