“Sensitive Geometries: Brazil 1950s–1980s”
Hauser & Wirth | West 18th Street
Anna Maria Maiolino’s Mother/Father, 1971/1999, offers a concise exercise in the absurdity of genealogical charts. The Italian-born, Brazil-trained artist made the ink-and-Letraset-on-paper work in English, a language she struggled to understand, the same year that she left New York, after a three-year sojourn, for Rio de Janeiro. In the piece, the words MOTHER and FATHER are repeated, rotated, and scattered willy-nilly across the square units of a grid, the randomness of their occurrence and orientation sabotaging the very idea of hereditary flow.
It is rather ironic that Maiolino’s work (from her “Mapas Mentais” [Mental Maps] series, 1971–76) was awarded pride of place in “Sensitive Geometries: Brazil 1950s–1980s,” a group exhibition organized by the dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément at Hauser & Wirth that capitalized on the ever increasing interest in Brazilian postwar abstraction. The show’s title was adopted from geometría sensible, a phrase first used by the Argentinean critics Damián Bayón and Aldo Pellegrini and popularized by the Brazilian historian Roberto Pontual, who used it as the title of a 1978 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio, one of the earliest curatorial efforts to identify a uniquely Latin American approach to geometric art. The current show also invoked Brazilian Neo-concretism, a short-lived but astonishingly fertile constellation of artistic experiments that took place between 1957 and 1961, also primarily in Rio. Yet it did so by association rather than content: No works by the internationally acclaimed triumvirate now most closely associated with the movement—Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape—were included. And indeed, only one of the show’s twelve artists, Franz Weissmann, was a member of the Neo-concrete group. (He was represented by a remarkable pounded-aluminum relief created in Paris in 1966, several years after the movement’s dissolution). Nevertheless, Neo-concretism haunted the show, most explicitly in the accompanying publication, which includes the Neo-concrete manifesto and mimics the catalogue design of the movement’s inaugural exhibition in 1959.
An independent foldout included with the current catalogue, which has no counterpart in the historical document, meanwhile, resurrects the earlier movement of Concretism as a central point of reference. This foldout features diagrams that chart a so-called Family Tree of Concrete Art, with attractive sets of arrows and overlapping shapes representing the various movements or scientific and political developments that ostensibly led to the Brazilian phenomenon. Quite unlike Maiolino’s Father/Mother, which posits the self as a dizzying field of cartographic dispersal, this document choreographs both directionality and genealogical climax, with Concrete art as the culmination of avant-gardism and intellectual culture alike. If Father/Mother explodes myths of origin and teleology even as it insists on the ineluctable relationality (indeed, contamination) of the self, then this chart offers up a phantasmic coherence of artistic production, smoothing the way for the market absorption of works as commodities and art-historical signs.
Yet in their sheer chronological, conceptual, and stylistic range, the works included in “Sensitive Geometries” spectacularly unsettled this process of codification, and in this yielded an exhibition that was, paradoxically, a success. Works ranged from modest gouaches by the muralist Paulo Werneck, whose career peaked in the 1940s; to quasi-serial compositions by the art educator Ivan Serpa, a pivotal figure in mid-1950s avant-garde circles who was sidelined from Neo-concretism itself; to Maiolino’s explicitly political S.O.S. no Trópico de Capricórnio, 1974/2008, which features the shape of Brazil, then suffering under a stifling military dictatorship, stamped in black onto a map of South America. Three suites of works by Mira Schendel, whose diaphanous prints and paintings consistently circumvented the monikers and manifestos of her time, marked an exquisite pause within the exhibition as a whole. Paulo Roberto Leal’s sculptures made from unfurled rolls of paper and his embroidered screenprints, pieces that exploit the intervals between overlapping planes, were likewise revelatory and fresh. All in all, these myriad tangents, dead ends, precursors, anachronisms, offshoots, and autonomous experiments indicated an intricate and highly textured field of artistic practice that continues to confound reductive summations of modern Brazilian art.