Lenora de Barros Brazil, b. 1953

Taking forward the legacy of Brazilian concretism, a movement with which she has had contact since childhood through her father, Geraldo de Barros, Lenora starts off from concrete, formal and conscious rigor, to produce a hybrid and playful body of work, in which her body, her voice and her imagery come into play. For Augusto de Campos, LB “is situated on the daring front” of what he calls “'between' artists”, producing an “artpoetry” that “puts at stake categories, definitions and limits”.

 

Among the most impactful works at the beginning of her career are Poem (1979) and Homage to George Segal (1985), both present in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017-2018), curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta and presented at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Museum (New York) and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

 

Homage to George Segal began ten years earlier, in 1975, when the artist captured through photos the process in which, while brushing her teeth, the gesture spills over her entire face until she becomes a figure that resembles the depersonalized sculptures by Segal. A decade later, based on this work, the artist recorded her first pioneering videoperformance in Brazil. In Poem (1979), LB investigates what is literal in the sense, in order to create new layers of meaning that go beyond the obvious. In this photo-performance, the artist rubs her tongue on typewriter keys, physically and plastically exploring the conceptual fusion that exists between body-tongue and idiom-tongue. The gesture is simple and explicit, but it triggers countless reflections, where the title crowns the work with an almost provocative tone, especially for those who do not accept a poem that is out there wandering off the page.

 

Lenora de Barros produced several works in which her tongue is protagonist, such as Vertebral Tongue and In the Country of the Big Tongue, Give Meat to those Who Want Meat, part of the installation The Multimillionaire Contribution of All Errors produced by LB, Walter Silveira and Arnaldo Antunes for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1998. The work In the Country of the Big Tongue.... — which, in the "Bienal da Antropofagia" [Antropofagy Biennial] in 1998 was presented as a sound installation combined with enlarged photographs — unfolded itself, in 2006, into a videoperformance in which the artist eats her own tongue. Among the inspirations for this work were not only the artist’s reflections and interest in the tongue-tongues binomial, but also a conversation that the adolescent LB had had with the poet Décio Pignatari. In it, Lenora asks Décio: “what is metalanguage?”, to which he replies: “metalanguage is the mouth that eats the mouth that bites the tongue”.

 

The artist builds her work in a coherent way and in constant dialogue with her previous works, creating performances that unfold into installations, videos, photographs, and so on. Such as the Ping-Poems series, in which she uses ping-pong balls to establish visual and sound games, present in the works Acid City (1994) and Ping-Poems for Boris (2000). This investigation goes back to her first solo exhibition at the Mercato del Sale gallery in Milan, entitled Poesia é coisa de nada (1990).

 

Another striking work by Lenora de Barros is Wanted by Myself (2001), which derives from the work Hair Styles (1994), a series of photos published in the column ...Umas., maintained by the artist from 1993 to 1996, in the Jornal da Tarde newspaper. In Hair Styles, LB appears with the same bewildered facial expression in different hairstyles, artificially arranged by a hairdressing software. The idea for the work Wanted by Myself came in 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center and the dissemination of Osama Bin Laden "Wanted" posters. Lenora de Barros is a restless and radical creator.