Praça da República

Thais Rivitti

 

There are five wasted clowns at the center of the exhibition. Maybe they are not that old, but they have this faraway, blank look and small, misty or half-closed eyes overshadowed by heavy makeup, which makes them look tired. These are thick paintings that appear to be melting.
When I look at this set, I think of Warhol’s portraits, especially the silkscreen series of Marilyn and Liz Taylor. In contrast, of course. Marilyns’ makeup is a graphical stain, a thin layer of paint which delimits a color area. The clowns’ makeup is dense and irregular. If the colors of the printed stains alternate in different combinations in Warhol’s work, functioning as independent layers, the very makeup is the object of painting in Rodrigo’s clowns. If you remove it virtually nothing will be left – hence the existence of unpainted, empty areas in the paintings in question. The clown paintings – full of marks of painting knives, brushstrokes and masses of paint that create textures and accumulation – show the opposite of the evanescent, immaterial effect of Warhol’s portraits.
The popular culture addressed by Rodrigo Andrade in this exhibition is certainly different from Warhol’s pop culture. Away from the superstars, The Factory’s environment and New York’s glamour underground in the 1960s, Rodrigo visits Praça da República, a place filled with painters on Sundays, African immigrants, ladies selling tablecloths, inexpensive crafts, and food stalls.
With these portraits, which are visionary in a way, Warhol would announce the independence of the image in the society of the spectacle. In the paintings of Praça da República, Rodrigo Andrade raises old issues and forms of painting, old schemes and techniques regarded as awkward today. But this reference to the past – not a strictly temporal past, since we know that Praça da República, for better or worse, still survives, but rather to a kind of “archaic” painting – is not so easily understood. It is neither a compliment to the popular (a redemption in the strong sense of the word), nor a conviction, an ironic or parodical exhibition of its clear limitations.
It is rather a clash established in the field of painting, whose background, I believe, is one of the key issues concerning art in the twentieth century. An issue that deals with the idea of an autonomous aesthetic field and collides with the utopian idea of dissolution of art in life. Praça da República’s works on view in the back room use the traditional portrait form (while the front room features traditional landscape paintings). Within the established genre of “female portrait”, the artist takes as a model, in the case of “Loira” [Blonde], a painting done with spray on the façade of a beauty salon. This figure, an example of beauty standards advertised in women’s magazines – blonde, blue eyes, long eyelashes, pink lipstick and windswept hair – becomes strange on the canvas.
A very dense painting creates a kind of mask, emphasizing the distance that the childlike drawing of the woman, which was removed from the graffiti on the gate, keeps from any real image. Layers of paint are added in a kind of Photoshop with oil paint. Finally, a glow effect is produced with a layer of white paint in specific spots and brings to mind a photographic image. The brightness of camera flashes is reflected on the model’s face… The old black men, in turn, make up a sequence that mimics, step by step, the History of Art from Realism to Cubism. What Cubist paintings presented as a great novelty appears now as a mannerism devoid of revolutionary intent, a mere automated mode of composition. The figure of the old black man has been modernized. Literally.
The landscapes are full of not-very-subtle gradations, the moonlight or sunlight sparkles on the water (either on the sea, lakes or rivers) and flowers painted with print marks of the actual paint brush on the canvas. Some allude to what is typical Brazilian: the Pantanal, the Cerrado, and the rainforest. A niche that is very well explored by amateur painters, with an eye to the immediate success brought by the reiteration of the image of an exotic, beautiful Brazil. Others are part of a wider repertoire of painting, such as the sea glinting in the moonlight (and the wave breaking on the rocks) and the classic theme of the wildfire. These are also a kind of ‘bestseller’ paintings.
Those who are familiar with Rodrigo Andrade’s production may identify in his earlier works some resemblance to the landscapes of this exhibition. The generation of artists he belongs to – who started to produce in the 1980s – finds an art scene in which the formal approach of high modernism in the United States was collapsing and pop art was achieving recognition. Since his early works, Rodrigo has welcomed and let the popular universe to manifest: the reference to comics, dialogs with popular painting, the atmosphere of Brazilian bars in Lanches Alvorada. The question posed by this exhibition seems to be: Is it worth building a history of painting that is detached from the history of art? Such possibility, which has been opened up in contemporary art, would lead to an analysis that would cover not only museum paintings, but also those found in a variety of places: from graffiti on steel gates to Disney cartoons. But deciding whether this exhibition supports or advises against such an undertaking would be like asking Warhol if his works, which exposed the modus operandi of the US cultural industry, adhered to or were critical of this system.

Thais Rivitti is curator and art critic.

Text originally posted on the site: https://atelie397.com/1812-2/
On the occasion of the exhibition Rodrigo Andrade – Praça da República, exhibited at Ateliê 397 during the period from November 30 to December 18, 2015 and January 11 to 22, 2016.