Felipe Scovino

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  print April 2023

  Cinthia Marcelle

  “Cinthia Marcelle: por via das dúvidas” (Cinthia Marcelle: By Means of Doubt), organized by Isabella Rjeille, was a survey of the work of the Brazilian artist, whose career began in the late 1990s. Marcelle belongs to a generation of artists that includes, among others, Marilá Dardot, Lais Myrrha, Matheus Rocha Pitta, and Sara Ramo, all of whose works are characterized by the association of Conceptual language with an investigation of economics and politics. That generation was marked by two moments of transition. The first, around 2003, was the election of a leftist government in Brazil,

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  print March 2023

  Marina Rheingantz

  The title of Marina Rheingantz’s recent exhibition “Sedimentar” (Sedimentary) alludes to an image present throughout the artist’s nearly twenty-year career: the dissolution or suspension of solid materials in a liquid. Through their dispersion of forms, her paintings’ watery atmosphere is soft and fluid. In Suspiro (Sigh; all works 2022), small dynamic brushstrokes construct a tranquil surface made up of islands of color. While not exactly a gloomy painting, it carries a sense of mystery and apprehension. The light that permeates the canvas, particularly its upper region, resembles a fog that

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  print October 2022

  Maria Martins

  Maria Martins (1894–1973) spent much of her life outside Brazil (she was a diplomat’s wife in countries throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, as well as in the United States), and her work was not widely lauded in her native country until the 1950s. Even so, her art, and her sculpture in particular, was clearly crucial to the emergence of abstraction in Brazil and a growing focus on indigenous beliefs in its art. “Maria Martins: Desejo imaginante” (Maria Martins: Tropical Fictions), curated by Isabella Rjeille and Fernanda Lopes, presented Martins’s sculptures, engravings, and drawings—along

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  print Summer 2022

  Mário Cravo Neto

  This retrospective, subtitled “Espíritos sem nome” (Nameless Spirits) and curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio, was a panorama of the work of one of the most important Brazilian photographers. Born in the state of Bahia in 1947, Mário Cravo Neto was the son of a sculptor, Mário Cravo Jr. In 1968, in one of his earliest works, Cravo Neto photographed the mythic set of soapstone sculptures of the twelve disciples executed by Brazilian Baroque sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa, popularly known as Aleijadinho (the Little Cripple). These images already reveal an interest in plasticity and the framing of

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  print February 2022

  Manoel de Oliveira

  For “Manoel de Oliveira Photographer,” curator António Preto gathered more than a hundred of the renowned Portuguese film director’s photographs, many of which had never before been shown. Produced between the late 1930s and the mid-1950s, these images offered a valuable critical reading of modernity in Portugal and illuminated the creative processes of one of its great artists.

  In the works in the first part of the exhibition, Oliveira’s camera turned to the interior of the country—to the vastness of its landscape, the labor in its fields, and the individuality of farmworkers who cease to be

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  picks August 16, 2021

  “Presence: Five Contemporary African Photographers”

  The subject of this exhibition is Africa, as seen and experienced by five contemporary African photographers. This Africa is by no means an exoticized continent or a primitive, timeless whole.

  In Grand Entrance, 2019, Amilton Neves Cuna, who hails from Maputo, Mozambique, delves into the inhabited ruins of the Grand Hotel of the coastal city of Beira. Despite the atmosphere of catastrophe, the space is teeming with resilience. Sunlight floods the once-majestic rotunda, illuminating signs of life that offset the surrounding desolation: a mother climbing a stone staircase with a baby in her arms,

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  print April 2021

  “Engraved into the Body”

  The exhibition took as its starting point the activities of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN). Based in Rio de Janeiro and led by artist Abdias do Nascimento, the

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  picks December 28, 2020

  Paulo Vivacqua

  For at least twenty years, Paulo Vivacqua has dedicated himself to research involving the fabrication of sound objects in Brazil. As a musician, he composes electroacoustic minimalist pieces presented either in concerts or in gallery settings. In the last few years, he has begun to introduce elements of painting into his sound works. Stepping into this exhibition feels a little like entering Giverny: Corale (Coral), 2019–, a rainbow of round monochrome speakers, is arrayed throughout the space in an archipelago of clustered, colorful mycological structures (what if Monet, like Dylan, had gone

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  print March 2020

  Solange Escosteguy

  Solange Escosteguy’s artistic trajectory began with her participation in the seminal exhibition “Nova objetividade brasileira” (New Brazilian Objectivity) at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 1967. In the exhibition catalogue, the show’s main organizer, the artist Hélio Oiticica, described Brazilian avant-garde art as characterized by, among other things, the participation of the viewer, the tendency for the object to negate and supersede the frame of the easel, the adoption of collective propositions, and new formulations of the concept of antiart. In considering the work of Escosteguy,

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  print December 2019

  Djanira da Motta e Silva

  Originating at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and organized by Rodrigo Moura and Isabella Rjeille, this exhibition of works by Djanira da Motta e Silva (1914–1979)—or simply Djanira, as she is more commonly known—showcased nearly four decades of paintings by the primarily self-taught artist of working-class origin and indigenous ancestry. Often dismissed as “naive” or “primitive” (one American reviewer observed that a painting of hers would look at home on the cover of a New Yorker), the artist’s oeuvre has been symbolically effaced from the canon of Brazilian art, lending all the more the

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  print October 2019

  Hudinilson Jr.

  The beginnings of Hudinilson Jr.’s solo artistic career in the early 1980s coincided with the final years of the dictatorship in Brazil. His initial forays in the artistic field had begun the previous decade, when he cofounded the 3Nós3 collective with Rafael França and Mario Ramiro. One of the group’s most ironic performances, Ensacamentos (Baggings), 1979, exemplifies these artists’ response to autocratic rule. At night, they roamed around São Paulo and used plastic bags to cover the faces of statues and monuments that invariably represented historical deeds related to military conquests. The

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  print April 2019

  Paulo Roberto Leal

  Paulo Roberto Leal (1946–1991) began his artistic career in the late 1960s. Based in Rio de Janeiro, he had the historical distance to perceive the importance of the Neo-Concretism of the preceding generation of Brazilian artists, especially Willys de Castro’s combination of emptiness, inventive settings, and painting in his “Objetos ativos” (Active Objects), ca. 1959–63, and Lygia Clark’s invention of the “organic line” when she abandoned the canvas in the mid-1950s in favor of works constructed from wooden panels with spaces between them. Each of those gaps made up, in the words of the critic