Rodrigo Andrade: a retrospective view

Michael Asbury

For this retrospective exhibition Rodrigo Andrade had initially proposed to install a work in a bar in the Santa Ifigenia neighbourhood surrounding the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo. The proposal sought to ‘restage’ an exhibition that took place in 2001, when a number of paintings were installed within a specific site, a local bar, or boteco, called Lanches Alvorada. At that occasion, and after considerable negotiation, Andrade persuaded the owner of the establishment to allow several monochromes to be ‘plastered’ directly onto the walls of the bar. The works were thus displayed amongst the other cluttered decoration and boteco paraphernalia: arrangements of cachaça bottles of dubious quality; a television set hung from a wall; beer advertising posters; price lists; pronouncements about the uselessness of demanding credit at those premises; and a hand-written note warning customers not to touch the fresh paint (a reference to the strange new additions to the decor).

The idea was straightforward enough, that of placing art within a real-life scenario. What seemed discrepant was the type of art being proposed to undertake such a task: monochrome fields of colour presented in thick single layers of oil paint that possessed substantial mass.

Historically, the avant-garde’s drive to integrate art into life radically affected the form that the work took. In such circumstances the necessity of communicating with the public was often a central question, whether through the desire to shock, as overt or provocative slogans and, later still, as an invitation for participatory action. The difference with Andrade’s proposal was that the work did not seek any of these solutions but merely presented itself, with all its implied purity and simplicity, in a place most commonly associated with the working class. The work of art thus invaded a place to which it was perceived not to belong, while the place itself invaded the work in a process of reciprocal contamination that was set in motion.¹

In an anecdote about the unpredictability of the proposition, Andrade recalls an episode that occurred shortly after he inaugurated that particular intervention at Lanches Alvorada. Trying to convince a sceptical friend to make the effort to visit the bar, the artist insisted that if his friend was to do so he would witness something he had never seen before. The statement was convincing enough for his friend to pay a visit, and in a completely unexpected manner, while at the bar, he witnessed on that television set, next to the masses of fresh oil paint, the attacks to the Twin Towers in New York on the 11^th of September. Later, the friend would jokingly claim that Andrade had been absolutely right in his assertion.²

The proposed ‘re-staging’ of this installation would associate it with another, albeit more predictable, political conflict, one that is being played out now and whose consequences will affect the foreseeable future. This time the arena is local rather than international, and the artist is entirely aware of the nature of the reciprocal relation being proposed.

The area around the Pinacoteca do Estado is not a neutral urban arena. It is a space that is loaded, socially, culturally and most of all, politically. On the morning of 21^st of May, 2017, the current Mayor of Sao Paulo, in an act of truculence and plain disregard for other human beings, ordered riot police to evacuate an area within Santa Ifigênia known as Cracolândina. The mayor himself was present, sporting a black leather jacket and speaking to friendly camera crews about a clean city, about enough being enough, and so forth, while the operation proceeded to knock down buildings whose inhabitants were still inside. As any Paulistano will know, the Cracolândia region is adjacent to the Luz Rail Station and the Pinacoteca. In any large metropolis this would be prime real estate: a highly desirable area, well connected with transport links and in proximity to culture, restaurants and commerce.

If London’s St Pancras Station is widely considered as the architectural model for the Luz Station itself, the region around it had, in the recent past, similar characteristics to those currently found in São Paulo: a high number of drug dependents, prostitution, economic migrants and low income inhabitants. Like the case in London, where the surrounding area as well as the station itself underwent a multi-million regeneration programme, the area around the Luz Station has been earmarked for re-development. As in London, the planned Public Private Partnership project in São Paulo has not taken into consideration the current population living in the area. Naturally, political tensions between the interests of current inhabitants and those of the political elite, the contractors and estate agents, are high and are reflected, according to Rachel Rolnik, in the very denomination of the area, Cracolândia, which associates families and workers of low income with drug dependents and prostitution.³

Andrade’s proposal to intervene in such a highly charged arena was therefore not inconsequential. It would not have been so much a question of re-staging a work but of charging this new version with these very site-specific tensions. The locals and the Pinacoteca visitors, whose social-class and, very possibly, opinions on the future of the area differ considerably, would have been brought together in an entirely distinct manner compared to the way the original installation juxtaposed its publics. This would have been a very rare occasion indeed.

I say ‘It would have been’, because the museum having considered the volatile state in which the region finds itself – with frequent and unannounced police interventions in the area, muggings and sporadic daytime violence – has deemed it too dangerous to propose that its visitors frequent that area. The artist has therefore postponed the project, and so, like the neighbourhood itself, it will ‘happen’ at another time in a foreseeable future.

It would be unfair to compare this decision by the management of the Pinacoteca with that of the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, when Hélio Oiticica and his friends from the Mangueira shanty-town attempted to enter the establishment dressed in Parangolés during the inauguration of the exhibition Opinião, in 1965.

It is important to state that, at a moment when all manners of accusations, interdictions and censorship are being directed at the field of culture and its institutions, it might be useful to state certain distinctions that exist between those historic events in the 1960s and the current ones. While politicians today are happy to ascribe to calls of censorship based on dubious facts and politically inspired bad faith, the direct consequences of their policies are creating interdictions within the social, cultural and urban fabric, such as in the case of this cancelled project.

While in this case, the actions of museum officials did not lead to the interdiction but are the consequence of circumstances beyond their own control, the tensions that Andrade’s proposed event would have inevitably raised are not entirely external to the work of art. On the contrary, as I will argue in this essay, at the very roots of Andrade’s creative process, there is a will to create all manners of relations, some more tense than others.

Given the distinctions that exist between the historic and the contemporary cancellations, to make this association is useful, other than demonstrating the shameful persistence of the social abyss that divides the country, in that it reveals certain characteristics in Andrade’s approach.

Therefore, while Oiticica sought to cross social divides in the belief that the experience of the sublime was ‘translatable’ across culturally and socially specific domains, for Andrade, admittedly less idealistic in his outlook, the mere act of revelling the mutual incomprehensibility (or untranslatability) of one towards the other, and vice versa, is a radical gesture in itself.

Alberto Tassinari in this sense is very precise when he asserts that these works by Andrade become metaphors of a sociability, since each block of paint “is defined by the discrepancies between” itself and another block. The critic’s description of this condition as “another’s other” could simultaneously describe both the work of art as well as the relations caused by the artist’s act of placing it in the world.⁴

In Andrade’s Vermeer, View of Delft, (2007-2017), a large blue rectangle and a smaller yellow one occupy a proportion of the sky within a reproduction of a painting by Vermeer. We find here the metaphorical sociability that Tassinari suggests; that relation of otherness played out between each block of paint is multiplied in the anachronistic relation between the historic and the contemporary, between representation and monochrome, between the photographic reproduction and the fresh paint.

Recently, Andrade has further explored this relationship between photography and painting in a series of works that juxtapose the monochromatic field with the depiction of landscapes, as well as world events and leaders with street art graffiti stencil techniques. In the dark deceptively photographic-looking compositions such as Bicicletaria [Bicycle Shop] of 2011, Grade [Metal Fence] of 2010 and Rua Deserta com Viaduto [Deserted Road with Fly-over] also of 2010, we perceive the subtle repercussions of his exploration of dualities in tension. If, Andrade has been working for some time on the relation between painting and photography – that pair of disciplines that could also be described as the another’s other – such works also demonstrate the multitude of avenues yet to be explored. Here, in retrospect, we can merely trace how such relations emerged.

In Untitled [Rodrigo Andrade in Edward Hopper] of 2006, pasted over a reproduction that appears to have been taken from a catalogue page, a black and a blue mass of paint occupy the upper surface of a wall in a painting of an office scene by Edward Hopper. The strategy of creating relations appears to be the same as with the Vermeer View, except that in this case another relation is created. That same year, Andrade produced an installation entitled Paredes da Caixa, where such blocks of colour occupied discrete spaces within an actual office: the old headquarters of a bank, transformed or preserved by that very same bank into a museum of its former self. Now the artist juxtaposes the real space with that of its reproduction. The term ‘real’ in this case must be used with caution, since in this instance the work intervenes within a ‘preserved’ space, one that, like a photograph, is frozen in time. The work thus brings the museum and its contents back into the contemporary, back into life, as opposed to leaving the museum to inhabit the world, it carries it with it. However, the real space is also brought back into the fictitious space of Edward Hooper’s painting, a fact that the following manoeuvre proposed by the artist sought to further explore.

In conjunction with the installation, Andrade produced an accompanying film, where the very installation served as the film’s location. In it, the character of the bank manager, a man cursed with painterly hallucinations, also happens to direct the film, since he was played by Andrade himself.⁵ The professional domains, administrative and artistic, fictional and real, are placed into discrepant relations, literally and conceptually, while a similar conjunction is dramatized between painting and film.

Even before the Lanches Alvorada installation, Andrade’s Projeto Parede [Wall Project] of 2000, was installed along the corridor of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. It brought the museum’s architecture into the work in a similar way, as in the other subsequent examples. Rather than the museum imposing a particular interpretation on the work, it is the work itself that drew out of the place obvious art historical references. It is impossible not to think of Mondrian, for instance, when looking at the photographs documenting the work, taken from across the dividing window panels from the cafe.

This intrinsic duality, “another’s other”, that emanates from these works, reveals Andrade’s personal creative approach, one that seeks to problematize multiple and antagonistic relations: the real space and the simple yet sophisticated artifice of the monochrome; the juxtaposition of abstraction in its purest form and the photographic image; the cinematic and the stillness of the individual picture; the social space and the cultural domain; the contemporary and the historic. The list can go on almost indefinitely, but in essence in all these situations the tension stems from an initial juxtaposition, the placing of two masses of colour against and in relation to each other.

There is a peculiar ‘realness’ in the blocks of paint themselves, in the way that they seem ‘alive’ and still active in their paste-like materiality. Their edges maintain the traces left by the removal of their moulds, those marks incurred by the instrument that first contained them. Like the warning stated in improvised sign at Lanches Alvorada, these surfaces seem to have not quite set, as if their mass is still active, fresh, organic. It is quite clear that these areas of pure colour and volume, that sometimes go on to occupy different spaces in the city, emerged out of pictorial explorations of space and colour, foreground and background. We can trace their development back to a series of paintings where a gradual simplification of the means of depicting interior spaces and objects took place.

Undoubtedly the longest running series in Rodrigo Andrade’s trajectory, these works composed of pairs of contrasting blocks of colours, emerged out of what seems to be, in retrospect, a natural progression. The transition itself appears to have occurred between 1998 and 1999, but the origins of the process that leads to this leap go back further still, at least as early as 1990. During 1999 a clear transition takes place from loose figurative interior spaces towards abstracted blocks of colour. Typically, in many works throughout the 1990s, the increasing uniformity and flatness of backgrounds, together with the reduction in the range of colours – down to two or three, predominantly greens, yellows, blacks and reds – served to emphasise one or two often discrepant objects within the composition. Referring perhaps to Vincent van Gogh, a chair often accompanies the figure of a lone tree, both figuring centrally in these paintings, making it uncertain whether these are interior or exterior spaces. As these paintings progress through that decade, these enigmatic figures gradually lose their figurative associations becoming flat, monochromatic, blocks.

Commenting on Andrade’s 1995 solo exhibition, Lorenzo Mammì affirms that amongst his generation his work was probably the one that remained most closely associated with the legacy of expressionism.⁶ However, the critic goes on argue that while Andrade explores nuances specific to Brazilian references within that tradition, namely Oswaldo Goeldi, he differentiates himself from his predecessor through the very materiality of paint, as opposed to the flat graphics of print. Mammì’s observation captures this particular moment within Andrade’s trajectory: the mid-point within the synthetizing process of his expressionist and neo-expressionist formative references, as we will see below, gives way to the elegant simplicity of the blocks of colours, already discussed. We may now think of this transition as the gradual abandonment of the iconography of expressionism in exchange for a materiality of paint that is presented in the tension between flatness and volume.

Today, to speak of an evolution from figuration towards abstraction in the work of any artist would hardly make sense. Yet, as a painter, the legacy of art history not only features strongly within Andrade’s work but drives the work itself, it provides the very problems that it incessantly attempts to resolve. Abstraction and figuration, the problem of foreground and background, the relation between different fields of colour, all these issues evolve in his work anachronistically, yet they do so within a very clear and coherent personal trajectory, one that registers the, sometimes gradual at other times abrupt, resolution of those conflicts which the artist imposes upon himself. This is in fact a very contemporary condition. The evolution of the work does not therefore follow any pre-established tenets but may re-visit past moments (whether in his personal trajectory of within the wider art historical canon) when and if necessary or desirable.

Painting, by its very nature and tradition, is self-referential. I mean this not in the Greenbergian sense of the work’s autonomy and specificity but in the fact that it is a medium that is condemned to carry its own history.  If the crisis in painting arose from the realisation that, after Malevich’s monochromes, painting could only refer to its own past, the return of painting in the 1980s marked the final acceptance and embrace of such a fact. If at the time, this was heralded by many as being a characteristic of the postmodern era, today it seems more coherent to claim, following Giorgio Agamben, that such a fact pertains simply to the anachronistic nature of contemporaneity.

We have grown used to thinking about ‘contemporary art’ as emerging out of the conceptual rupture with abstract expressionism. That is to say, a new form of art making that arose out of a particular genealogy of modern art, one that legitimised itself by rebelling against the ideal progress towards abstraction, or more specifically, against painting’s own medium specificity. Pop art, conceptualism and minimalism are thus understood under such a perspective as three distinct but related inaugural branches of the contemporary. Each of these branches rejected specific aspects of their immediate and common predecessor, abstract expressionism. Yet, in each and everyone one of these movements the rupture was arguably only partial and took place by referring to previous moments within the longer time of art history. Pop art thus abolished abstraction while retaining painting and the two-dimensional plane as its principle support. It brought to the fore overt references to mass media yet whose germinating presence could already be found within cubism and dada. Conceptualism denied the specificity of the medium that had defined Greenberg’s idea of modernist painting, but it did so not entirely dismissing abstraction. On the contrary, it could be argued that it took abstraction to its very limits, to the level of language and thought. It achieved this by invoking the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the readymade. Minimalism also rejected the specificity of the medium, while being essentially abstract in nature and implicitly reviving the legacy of European constructivism. One must conclude therefore that what was commonly rejected in these three rebellious tendencies was not abstract expressionism itself but the idea of the linear progress of modern art.

To periodise such movements as a succession of rebellions has its limitations not only in terms of the anachronism present within the denomination abstract expressionism but more importantly in the specificity, or provincialism, of that particular genealogical line. If Alfred Barr institutionalised the idea of modern art with the creation of the Museum of Modern Art and the notion of a trajectory towards abstraction, Greenberg transposed such an idea into its logical, and of course American, culmination.

The question thus arises as to how to consider those cases in which art developed outside such a genealogy. Should they be considered less contemporary than those that followed pop, conceptual or minimalist art? The fact seems that artists from around the world arrived at and responded to the so-called crisis in painting between the late 1950s to the 1970s through diverse and multiple means. And so, these artists found themselves articulating their varied and multiple local painterly traditions with the international advent of painting’s resurgence in the 1980s.

In Brazil during the early 1980s a new generation of artists became, almost immediately, associated with this so-called return to painting. That immediacy is in great part due to the contemporaneous international trends such as German neo-expressionism, Italian transvanguardia and ‘bad-painting’ in the United States. The association was further emphasised by the São Paulo Bienal of 1985, commonly known for a display of paintings along a corridor as if composing a ‘large canvas’. That event brought those young Brazilian artists, such as Andrade himself, side by side with their international peers.

They are usually described as a ‘generation’ since their arrival on the scene also coincided with a critical moment within the shift in Brazilian politics, from military regime to the return to democracy, and significant changes in the local art scene. A relative consolidation of an art market for contemporary art and the sense of renewal within the São Paulo Bienal, after so many years of imposed isolation and the repression of expression, marked a substantial shift from the cultural environment experienced over the previous decades.

The generational ‘brand’ was further emphasised by an exhibition held in 1984 at the Parque Lage Visual Arts School in Rio de Janeiro that displayed the work of emerging young artists, many of which painters, entitled ‘How Are You, 80s Generation?’ [Como vai você, Geração 80?]. With the benefit of hindsight however, certain regional and/or individual distinctions may now be perceived, particularly in the way these artists (for many are no longer painters) have integrated the national art historical cannon.

If at that moment in time, the label served as a positive form of identification, now three decades later, it may become a form of curse. Such associations often constrain critical and art historical contextualisation with a specific genealogy. This in turn risks imprisoning the artist within a particular understanding of that decade, denying or at the very least, obstructing any sense of progression that the work has since undergone.

More worryingly, when international and national generalisations are combined, the suggested sense of national cultural renovation appears to be based upon the idea that imported tenets, fads and trends were somehow adapted uncritically at a local level. In short, it implies the notion of a tabula rasa that encourages a certain disconnection with what had taken place before, whether at a local or national level. It seems that such a conception should be, if not entirely contested, at the very least re-assessed and re-considered in light of not only the subsequent achievements of individual artists but in terms of the historical period as a whole. One must therefore be wary of broad generalisations and so it is with this note of caution that one should distinguish the emergence from the development of the work of Andrade.

Andrade insists in distinguishing himself and his immediate peers from other artists emerging in the 1980s in terms of his art education and the relationships arising from the establishment of a shared studio, the Casa 7.  It was formed by himself, Antonio Malta, Carlito Carvalhosa, Fabio Miguez and Paulo Monteiro (and Nuno Ramos who later replaced Malta). These were friends that had known each other from their school days, at Colégio Equipe, where they gathered around the production of comic books, their enthusiasm for rock music and later the informal art classes under Sergio Fingermann. According to Rodrigo Andrade:
 

 
Other than the aesthetics and the comic book references, the very career of Philip Guston would have appealed to the young Rodrigo still searching to assert his own creative identity. For Andrade, the transition from being an adolescent who liked to draw comic books to being a professional artist took place when art was no longer a pleasure but a problem.⁸ At that early stage the problem at hand appeared to be how to articulate his own formative years with the international influences he was now being exposed to, often as a consequence of frequenting Fingermann’s studio itself. Like Guston, Andrade appears to drawn upon his own past, re-visit previous interests, in order to then advance.

Guston himself is an interesting example of how predominant discourses of modern art collapsed and were redefined between the 1970s and 80s. Having attended high school with Jackson Pollock, he too would eventually become a celebrated abstract expressionist painter. Before that, Guston had responded to the expressionism of Max Beckmann and the metaphysical painting of De Chirico. It is to these early formative influences that he returns to, in an admittedly peculiar way, in 1968, when he radically abandoned abstraction by adopting a form of grotesque, metaphysical or comic-book existentialist-like figuration. Guston died in 1980, which prompted a celebration of his work internationally, including his inclusion in the 1981 São Paulo Bienal. It is at this moment that Andrade and many others of his generation come into contact with his work.⁹ As Robert Storr argued, with his death and his travelling retrospective that followed suit between 1980 and 81, Guston became an art world paradox, both an old master and a major reference for an emerging generation of painters.¹⁰

A significant distinction also existed between the broader approach to painting and that of his own group around their shared studio space at Casa 7. Andrade dismisses the label ’80s Generation’ for it implies an apolitical moment in which artists, after the apparent seriousness of the 1970s, celebrated the pleasure in the act of painting. For Andrade, the Casa 7 artists were more interested in producing a form of painting that was ‘heavy and anti-decorative’.¹¹ Already the concept of tension between the work and its public can be noted, in his disinterested approach to the local art circuit, an aspect that I tend to identify more with the COBRA group than with the transvanguardia and neo-expressionist movements of the time.¹² In this sense, the adoption of cheap materials such as Kraft paper and synthetic enamel provided the possibility of producing large scale paintings with broad gestures, free from the associated preciousness of the oil on canvas medium.

In the catalogue that launched the Casa 7 group in 1985, that indeed coined the term following the identification of the group with their shared studio, curator Aracy Amaral identified as somewhat problematic the discrepancy between the seriousness of those ambitious young artists and the precariousness of the Kraft paper medium.¹³ Yet, as we have seen, such discrepancies have become, albeit in ways that would have been unpredictable at the time, inextricably associated with Andrade’s work.

If the paintings grew in dimension, their themes became associated with vulgar topics, and the cheap paint was applied in a brutal, violent, immediate manner onto the flimsy paper. Despite this, it would be misleading to think of an absolute rupture from his predecessors, from the subtle themes that stemmed from the Santa Helena tradition to the ever-growing references to the woodcut prints of Goeldi.

The discovery of the transvanguardia and neoexpressionist artists acted upon Andrade not so much as direct influences but as confirmations of an interior necessity, one that attempted to resolve the conflict between his formative training in engraving and painting, still lives, and his childhood obsession with comic books, rock music and so forth. The introspection of Goeldi and the Santa Helena tradition in this sense met with Guston’s metaphysical, existential and narrative painting. Such conjunction is evident in Abandoned Studio and The Cabinet of Mr Oliva, both painted in 1985. These paintings explore the recurrent theme of the interior (office, studio, etc), now with an overt if irreverent reference to the art critic of the transvanguardia Achilles Bonito Oliva. In comparison with the critic’s cabinet jam-packed with canvases, we are left to imagine why the abandoned studio is emptied: whether by the demand for the work or abandoned by the artist’s own indifference. A relationship between each painting appears to be encouraged given their common dimensions (50 x 60 cm) or through the oppositions, the full and the empty, that their juxtaposition implies.

The Cellars of Academy and Untitled, both painted in 1984, also share the same dimensions (110 x 130 cm). Browns, oranges and dark reds are the predominant colours in these cluttered depictions of interiors. Both are claustrophobic, dirty and messy spaces. In the former, we perceive a variety of unrelated objects: a taxidermy or plaster cast of an eagle with its wings wide-spread; a globe; the severed arm of liberty still with torch in hand; a book; a draftman’s square; a coat of arms and elaborately framed canvases, their contents hidden as they are turned towards the wall. All these compete for space in the crowded interior. In the latter, we notice the debris of some form of precarious inhabitation, a chain smoking, hard drinking artist perhaps. The walls are crumbling and the floor is covered with remains of unidentified objects, ceramic vessels and rolls of paper perhaps. The furniture ill fits the space and partly covers a small framed picture on the far wall. A clock and a discarded watch seem superfluous references to the passing of time, given the amount of cigarette stubs scattered about the place.

When Andrade speaks about the decisive impact that the catalogue for Documenta 7 had upon his early production it is natural to think of this as the means through which he came into contact with the wider resurgence of painting. That 1982 exhibition had included works by Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, and Markus Lupertz, to name just a few artists that Andrade acknowledges as having been influential. Yet, he speaks of the impact that the discovery of these artists had on a particular way with which he was trained and the difficulty of articulating these with his early interests, such as comic-books. Moreover, he confesses that more than any painter, it was the discovery of Richard Long’s work, directly on and in nature, that had the greatest impact on his way of thinking about art.¹⁴ In juxtaposing, as I have done above, his early paintings into pairs, aleatory narrative relations seem to spontaneously arise. The studio and the depot of discarded academic props become strangely related, they become, or already are, “another’s other” perhaps.

In conclusion and in an effort to close, or short-circuit, one particular cyclic pattern within Andrade’s trajectory, let us end by reviewing one of his earliest works, the earliest in this exhibition in any case, in light of the latest manifestations of that trajectory with which this essay began.

In 1983, Andrade produced a modest sized (33 x 46 cm) untitled painting depicting the interior of what seems to be an artist studio. Within that space, an array of paintings is displayed, placed on or against the walls. Although not clearly defined, the paintings depicted within the overall composition seem colourful abstracts with strong yellows and reds. One of these is centrally positioned, propped over a chair. It forms a picture within a picture, framed by the rest of the environment.

Untitled (1983) appears to announce a transition, one that is represented in and of itself. It presents the difference between its own aesthetics and that of the pictures represented within it. None of those paintings within the painting seem to figure enclosed environments and their chromatic range differs dramatically from that of the represented interior space that contains them.

One exception is hung over the Venetian glass-window in the background. This consists of a painting with a sober pallet that appears to depict a landscape, Rio’s Sugar Loaf perhaps, a reclining nude, it is difficult to say precisely. The window itself appears to separate the studio in the foreground from another beyond, that of another artist perhaps. In the latter, we observe through the window, what seems to be a number of square canvases hung upon the opposite wall. In fact, as I later discovered, the window, rather fittingly, reflects works by Andrade himself, which are placed on the opposite wall and are revealed by the glass panels acting as mirrors.

That 1983 painting is clearly expressionistic in style, yet it already contrasts quite sharply with other works by Andrade produced the following year. Its colour spectrum is broader and the depicted interior ambient seems far less desolate than those in subsequent works we have discussed. Moreover, a direct, albeit reverted, relation is established between the cluttered interiors of his early work as a painter and the cluttered environments into which he now chooses to place his simple but sophisticated monochromes.

We may also think of this separation caused by the mirror, in terms of the duality that would mark much of Andrade’s later work. Perhaps a specific work comes to mind, such as Interior no Escuro [Darkened Interior] of 2010, which in this light, may be understood as the artist returning to that earlier 1983 work, to those mirrored panels, only to notice how time has made them opaque. This is not as absurd a claim as it may at first seem.

Untitled (1983) is a painting that acts as a form of pictorial manifesto, for it not only announces a rupture between itself and those pictures represented within, but also uncannily appears as a premonition of certain themes that would arise much later in Andrade’s career, such as the window frame theme, or the juxtaposition of two fields or masses of colour which appeared later still. These could hardly have been envisaged by the artist at the time he produced this small painting of his studio at Casa 7, the only work painted from direct observation displayed at this exhibition. These are nevertheless qualities that were noticed by Andrade’s older self, when compiling the images for a 2008 publication on his work, from where I am describing this work. In other words, the mature artist now understands aspects of an early painting as displaying certain impulses that he now recognises as having unfolded within his current production.

If in Velasques’ Las Meninas, the mirror reveals the subject matter (the King and Queen) of a painting whose back is turned towards the viewer, the mirroring windows in this little 1983 painting reveal its (admittedly latest) subject matter: retrospection. The painting now is no longer a simple depiction of a studio but one whose subject is the simultaneous representation of the work’s future, present and past.
 
Michael Asbury is art critic, curator, and art history teacher.

Text originally published in the catalogue Rodrigo Andrade: pintura e matéria (Rodrigo Andrade: painting and material) (1983-2014), curatorship and text: Taisa Palhares; text: Michael Asbury. São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017. Exhibition held at Estação Pinacoteca (Pinacoteca Station) from December 9, 2017 to March 12, 2018.