BRAZILIAN ROOTS IN PARIS EARTH: Radical Art from the Tropics

“The Vallois exhibition read like a conversation, with the artist exploiting materials in his distinctive, careful manner.”

Henrique Oliveira, Desnatureza, 2011. Wood, cement, pigments, installation created for Galerie Vallois, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

BRAZILIAN ROOTS IN PARIS EARTH: Radical Art from the Tropics
Iddhis Bing

Henrique Oliveira is a Brazilian artist who has shown extensively in his home country and in the States, not in the typical art-scene cities but in places like Houston, Boulder, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. His recent solo show in Paris, which is his first in Europe, has been a popular and critical success. Paris—no longer the “capital” of art—got to him first: Oliveira is still unknown in New York, but is already being adopted by the European exhibition circuit.

His foundation myth goes something like this: Oliveira was a student at the University of São Paulo, with a studio that looked out over a construction site. The work area was surrounded by a plywood fence, and over two years’ time Oliveira watched the wood deteriorate, layers soaked by the rain pulling apart in the heat, colored by the elements. Something clicked. A metaphor for painting was at work: the metamorphosis of one material into another. One week before his final student show, the new building was finished, the worn out fence discarded. Oliveira collected the scraps and used it in his first installation. Similarly, “Something From Nothing,” 2008, a show at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans stipulated that the participants work from scratch, using found or bartered materials. Oliveira’s Nuvem (Cloud) was fashioned out of mattresses, blankets and pillows from the street, bound tightly together and suspended in an open space between floors: a pointed reminder of the city’s recent traumatic experience.

His show at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois (36 Rue De Seine) has covered the spectrum of his output: large vibrant paintings, sculptures, and an installation, Desnatureza, created for the
gallery’s smallest and least accommodating room. The Vallois exhibition read like a conversation, with the artist exploiting materials in his distinctive, careful manner. Each medium reflected on the next, letting the viewer see that they all derived from the same conception, the same exploitation of space. Xilempasto, a “hybrid work, between two genres” (Oliveira’s description), oozes off the wall, a mad painting made of wood. It may well be the most adventurous work in the show.  

Apart from the origin of his materials, Oliveira posits a barely contained fecundity that invades the refined boxes where art is shown. It spills over, breaks through the floor… It is clearly not a psychological argument, and far more than recycling. Taking what has been discarded and making something of it implies a kind of magical transfer, a transformation. Oliveira crafts the process with a fine eye for detail, and yet he is a bit like the lion tamer at the circus who has let a very fierce beast out of its cage. Europe, always thirsty for what it considers raw, unmediated experience, will be sure to take the best seats down front.

Which brings us to the knockout: Desnatureza, an invented word—think unnatural, denaturalized, expatriated, cruel, a monster. At the opening, like the others, I walked around the piece several times. I wanted to touch, to lift the surface as if it were a living skin, thinking “Perhaps there is a secret it will give up if I do.” Visitors paused, looking up and down. Would someone try to climb it? No, the piece maintains its apartness as a work of art, although its operative fiction is that of an umbilical cord: a tree born in the tropics, twisting out of Parisian earth. Desnatureza simultaneously exploits the myths of decay and collapse, and that of sudden, magical growth.

As with any younger artist, facile comparisons abound. His generation’s relationship to earlier Brazilian avant-garde artists like Helio Oticica and Lygia Clark seems tenuous at best; that hasn’t stopped critics from citing it repeatedly. Oliveira has compared his paintings to a DJ, “sampling the different processes taken from informal abstraction in the 20th Century and ‘synthesizing’ them to create ‘figures of abstraction.’”

Henrique Oliveira, Tapumes – Casa dos Leões, 2009. Wood, PVC and mixed materials installation in situ 7th Biennale de Mercosul Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

But attempts to turn DJs into cultural arbiters already seems incredibly passé and in any case it is far from the radical approach taken by Clark and Oticica (or William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, for that matter). Mixing and matching in the cultural grab-bag of the immediate past is an inherently conservative project and, as Oliveira’s statement makes obvious, one that appears to be all camouflage and no center.

I can’t end this brief review without mention of Oliveira’s most radical and engaging work to date. Tapumes – Casa dos Leões was part of the seventh Biennale de Mercosul in Porto Alegre (2009). He took an old, two- story residence wedged between modern apartment blocks and exploded its contours, its decay, its silent and sullen absence of life. Tapumes is gothic, pendulous. (The oversized, in-your-face suggestion of organs, intestinal and sexual, is never far off.) It is simultaneously playful and scary. Is it substantially different than his other work? No, but by leaving the galleries and museums behind, he enters public space, he engages on a wider scale, trodding near the turf pioneered by Matta-Clark and others. I hope his European sojourn is a productive one.

Iddhis Bing is the author of *The Apartment Thief*, a novel. He lives in Paris and can be contacted at id37bing@gmail.com

This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.