Brazilian art in the contemporaneity
The Brazilian culture, diversified and uncompromised, flows across multiple references, infiltrated by several cultural systems. The complexity of materials, contexts and narratives that configure what is art in Brazil reveal the contrasts and distances existing between several speeches of art in contemporaneity. Brazilian artists are characterized frequently through an exotic and folkloric eye, which emerges from a difficulty to see the inexistence of a cultural unity. The absence of a systematic professional training made biennials and international exhibitions important places to share beliefs and aesthetical values, expanding artistic frontiers. In face of latent academicism and provincialism, the importance of renewing artistic intelligence has always been a major concern for artists. The European and American avant-garde movements intervened in a decisive way in the renewal of Brazilian art’s visual language, drawing attention to what existed of authentic and primitive in the local reality. In an embracing identity game, the different cultural realities that here live are the matrix which absorb and taste our flavors and knowledges, where, the presupposed, we are all equal, is central when we talk about art, revealing crossroads and affiliations. Mixing up is what is being a Brazilian is about, it is to be contaminated by different experiences and references. Is it an absence of character? Our historic frontiers are marked by crossing as a mean cultural exchange, which has selected, modified and recombined traditional ethnicities and predatory acculturation, imitation and innovation, local and peripheral contexts, digital and global in its artistic productions. Today, the greatest challenge is not just tolerance, but acceptance, sharing and coexistance, a diversity’s poetic and not a differences’ policy. The native’s malice seeks to experiment other solutions as its world vision, setting up a crisis in the idea of roots, traditions and authenticity; even the concept of a nation is put aside on the designations of art. The comprehension of crossings and simultaneity, of combination games and syncretism, contaminates the linear writings of art in disorder and deviations in its meanings. The idea of this compilation of works is to promote interaction and understanding of the eclectic, without stumbling in criteria or aesthetic judgments.
SILVIA MEIRA
Contemporary Art Curator
