Bergamin & Gomide is pleased to participate in FIAC Online Viewing Rooms, featuring works by Glauco Rodrigues (1929-2004). The fair takes place on online platform, from March 4th to 7th, 2021.
Glauco Rodrigues was born in Bagé, in Rio Grande do Sul, and started as a self-taught artist, producing mostly abstract works. In 1960, he participated in IX Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna [National Saloon of Modern Art], when he obtained an award that allowed him to travel to Europe. He participated in the Paris Biennale and, by invitation from the Brazilian Embassy, lived in Rome between the years 1962 and 1965, where he had the opportunity to participate in the XXXII Venice Biennale.
The anthropophagic process leads Glauco to translate and swallow Brazil through his paintings. Glauco started to revisit, in an iconoclastic way, themes attributed to national identity - tropical nature, Christ the Redeemer, carnival, women in bikinis, Indigenous people, Black people, Saint Sebastian, soccer, tales - sharing space with scenes taken from the history of Brazil.
“I propose to do a BRAZILIAN AND ANTHROPOPHAGIC PAINTING (and with emotion)”- manifesto written by Glauco Rodrigues in 1981
In the painting Pau-Brasil, Glauco Rodrigues represents an indigenous person who approaches the Kayapó ethnic group. The indigenous use the "botoque", a circular ornament, usually of wood, introduced in the ears, nostrils or lower lip by some Brazilian and African indigenous tribes. One of the most well-known leaders of the ethnic group, Chief Raoni Metuktire, is internationally recognized as an activist for the rights of native peoples and for the preservation of the Amazon.
The year 1974, in which the painting was produced, marked Brazilian indigenous history. With the opening of traffic on the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway, isolated indigenous populations came into contact with the white man, and as a result, they were almost wiped out by infections. When depicted the Kayapó Indianous behind a plate with a bunch of bananas, Glauco presents us with an irony laden with criticism of the Military Dictatorship, which built the Highway imbued with the slogan "Integrate so as not to surrender".
The sentence "Eis aí o que quiseram tanto os nossos avós para nós" [this is what our grandparents wanted so much for us], pictured as the indigenous man speech depicted, can be read in Portuguese and Tupi-Guarani. In the work, Glauco once more proposes criticism through irony, after all, the situation of the native peoples in Brazil was, and is, far from what the indigenous populations "wanted so much"…
In 1971, the same year as "Eis ai", Glauco produced a series of 26 works with the theme of the First Mass in Brazil - re-reading of Victor Meirelles' homonymous and famous painting from 1861 - which as a whole criticizes European colonization in Brazil, and especially the catechization of the native peoples.
The relevance and timelessness of Glauco Rodrigues' work, where Brazilian life themes and myths parade, is narrated by art critic Frederico Morais as a work in which "Everything is cannibalized, swallowed, then expelled as a colorful explosion, a visual delirium", and becomes even more meaningful in the current Brazilian political-social context.
In Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s essay, she reiterates: “in such dystopian times in which we live, when reality seems exaggerated and surreal (but unfortunately is not), when politics becomes an easy spectacle of authoritarianism, where green and yellow have been kidnapped from an important part of the population, Glauco's subtle irony may finally be at home and pertaining to present times. This time in standby which presents itself in the form of a present without a future.”
And she concludes: “The green and the yellow are us! Everything in his work is anthropophagic art, in the sense given by the Amerindian peoples who make food a ritual of exchange and swallowing, without a certain geography or a delimited time. Everything must be digested and vomited, in a celebration of Brazilian culture that devours the "others," but also itself and "us." This is because "we happen to be cannibals" - green and yellow, and tropical.”
