Glauco Rodrigues: We happen to be cannibals

text by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

The exhibition Acontece que somos canibais [We happen to be cannibals] which brings together works by the artist Glauco Rodrigues’ pop phase arrives in due time. At a moment of raging obscurantism; in which we have been damaged by a crisis which is political, economic, moral, cultural and sanitary; in which we are being invaded by an easy patriotism that has kidnapped our national symbols; in which we take a hit each day, there is nothing like the satirical and critical humor from the “gaúcho” [born in Porto Alegre] artist who, with his strong colors, series of drawings and infinite white background has made politics through art. Politics with a lot of art.

Glauco Rodrigues (1929-2004) never fit into a box or an easy definition. Born in Bagé, Rio Grande do Sul, he started his profession being self-taught. He soon received his first scholarship grant offered by his own city hall and spent three months at Escola Nacional de Belas Artes [National School of Fine Arts] in Rio de Janeiro (ENBA), which agglutinated the old, but also, new talents. Back in 1951, he founded the Clube da Gravura de Bagé [Bagé Engraving Club] along with his colleagues Glênio Bianchetti and Danúbio Gonçalves. The group, which had in common clear sympathies for socialism, became dedicated to figuration, depicting landscapes from the region, in a mostly rural environment.

The coexistence with painter friends made Glauco decide to dedicate himself professionally to the visual arts. He thus moves to the capital of his state and participates in the Glube de Gravura [Engraving Club] in Porto Alegre, established by Vasco Prado and Carlos Scliar.

In 1958, he leaves for Rio de Janeiro in search of a more solid career. In this context, he joins Senhor, a publication in which his friend Carlos Scliar already participated in, besides other known names from the Rio scene, such as Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa, and the then rookies, Paulo Francis and Jaguar. In a short duration, only five years – from 1959 to 1964 - the magazine made history due to its importance to the national language arts and the graphic arts; an area in which Glauco Rodrigues quickly stood out.

During this period, in order to survive in the big city, Glauco also dedicated himself to making portraits of the local elite and those which circulated through the lively capital of the country. They were not well-behaved portraits, which included unusual scenes and unexpected characters; all within a same painting. In 1960, the artist participated in the IX Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna [National Saloon of Modern Art], when he obtained an award that allowed him to travel abroad. Already in Europe, he took part in the Paris Biennial, and, by invitation from the Brazilian Embassy, lived in Rome between 1962 and 1965, where he had the opportunity to participate in the XXXII Venice Biennial. He then retreated into abstraction; a well esteemed genre in that context.

Upon his return to Brazil, he takes part in the exhibition Opinião 66, held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro [Museum of Modern Art], along artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Hélio Oiticica, Ivan Serpa and Lygia Clark. On the other hand, he resents the country’s new political environment, marked by the Coup of 1964. Undoubtedly, the Brazil he had left was no longer that which he reencountered.

He then decides that it was time to tell his visual history of Brazil. The artist’s canvases dated from that time were clearly influenced by pop art, which announced a series of aesthetics that was contrary to what he considered to be the “hermeticism of modern art”. The use of fluorescent, brilliant and vibrant colors - made with acrylic paint, polyester and latex - until then almost exclusively used in advertising, in magazine covers, street posters and consumer goods, also characterized the genre.

Glauco, who had lived with this movement when he was abroad, adhered to and translated it into the Brazilian context. The genre also matched the artist’s sentiments at the time of his return to Brazil. The diagnosis predicted a serious crisis in art, and the way to introduce it was by producing works critical to the massification of popular capitalist culture so marked by consumerism.

The painter starts to revisit, in an iconoclastic way, classical Brazilian works, themes linked to national identity – the indigenous, tropical nature, soccer, carnival - as well as subjects linked to national history.

Since he lived near the beach, Glauco began to portray everyday scenes of bathers enhanced by a combination of a series of symbolic and unexpected elements – girls in bikinis next to soldiers, well- known actors wearing tiny speedos interacting with anonymous people and dressed in a more conventional way; the Sugarloaf Mountain surrounded by tropical fruits; the immense sculpture of Christ the Redeemer coexisting with pop phrases like: “what contaminates man is not what goes into his mouth, but what comes out of his mouth.”

Pop, which drank from the graphic and reproducible experience, becomes center stage in Glauco Rodrigues’ work, who starts to make very colorful paintings that bring to mind flat colors used in industrial production. At the same time, the artist breaks the harmony by introducing figures in varied situations, but that seem loose in space, once they are arranged in front of great immaculately white backgrounds, and that thus give the impression of being infinite.

The works from that period were defined by him as Brazilianist and Anthropophagic. The “gaúcho” artist revisits the Tarsila do Amaral’ anthropophagy and the São Paulo modernist movement in order to also devour canonical subjects of the history of art in Brazil. Series such as: Terra Brasilis (1970), Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha (1971), No País do Carnaval (1982), Sete Vícios Capitais (1985) are part of the artist’s pop yawing. Attentive to symbolic efficacy, Glauco made many canvases about the Sugarloaf Mountain and hundreds about Saint Sebastian, with the saint being personified in the body of national artists, and always covered by arrows.

Next to the anthropophagic process – and which leads him to translate and swallow Brazil

through paintings that carry, at the same time, humor and social criticism - Glauco impregnates in his works a clear “carnavalization” of Brazilian culture. The indigenous people, the fruits, the soccer, the samba school dancers... all receive tropical colors and often appear accompanied by critical phrases; all in a carnival atmosphere and rhythm.

His creative process began with the reproduction of postcards, images taken from magazines or newspapers, and from his own photographs. It was from these records that the artist recreated environments, overusing green and yellow and at times, introducing the national flag itself. The dissonance and displacement between the figures and the presented circumstances, the party atmosphere, the fun, are elements that make evident the satirical vein of the painter, who, in times of dictatorship, refused to be complicit with the myths and stereotypes created and spread by the military.

Glauco Rodrigues’ pop phase is very well presented in the exhibition Acontece que somos canibais. Tropical fruits, Christ the Redeemer, Carnival, women in bikinis, the indigenous Kaxinawá, all share the space with scenes taken from the history of Brazil. This is the case of reinterpreting, through the lenses of critical Tropicalism, Almeida Júnior’s canvas - O Derrubador Brasileiro (1875) - and the work A Primeira Missa no Brasil by Victor Meireles (1861). These two well-known paintings, used almost as identity cards, restore, though patriotic lenses, facets and expectations of a country that wants to see itself as a pioneer and likes to represent itself on the basis of (false) tolerance and a supposed (and illusory) pacifism.

In Glauco Rodrigues’ perspective, however, realism becomes satire and mockery through allusion and correlation. Nothing is exactly what is there presented. In this new “Mass” (that is no longer the “First”) they parade in a samba rhythm, indigenous, religious and military, in fact, already present in the scene created by Meireles. But in Glauco’s painting they share the space with anonymous and curious people, children, couples and political personalities. Here, yes, we see a real “Geléia Geral” [General Jam], parodying the song released by Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto in 1968, in a kind of homage to Tropicalism.

Glauco Rodrigues’ Derrubador appears in a body posture identical to the original scene made by Almeida Junior, but, rather than reclining against a stone, he rests on a double map of Brazil, green and blue, also the color of the axe that he ostensibly carries in his left hand. The physical outline of the Brazilian territory when associated to the colors of the flag act as an inversion of the situation, and what was once elevation becomes criticism: a ready-made joke.

The Indigenous, a mother and her child, at times appear dressed as having been catechized – despite maintaining some identity signs, like body painting and a typical necklace - at times with their traditional clothing and instruments only to be betrayed by the blague of green and yellow, by a metal necklace or a watch on the boy’s left arm. As we see, they are all together and apart; converted and famished, as the sentence that completes the scene states.

Bananas, cashews, corn, roots, are described in the style of 18th century naturalists, but denounced, once again, by the exaggerated abundance of green and yellow, under the same white background. Black women fashionably dressed or in carnival clothes - often presented in green and yellow - take an Indigenous girl by the hand, with her necklace of the Nation ostensibly larger than her diminutive body.

At last there they are, the Brazilians, hybrids as the “myth of racial democracy” wanted - which at that time was much exploited by the Military Dictatorship - but, at the same time, too hierarchical. Mixture also works here on the basis of “all together and separate”.

Even the graphic typology takes on a fundamental format and importance when inserted in Glauco Rodrigues’ canvases. On one hand, it recalls the writings that accompanied watercolors from 19th century travelers who, not content with picturesquely sketching the Portuguese colony, often included texts and thus sought to settle any doubts over interpretation. In the case of Glauco’s paintings, however, typography takes on a critical role while also becoming an aesthetic element. Generally drawn in blue, often in green and yellow or in a palette of their own, they are configured as typographic elements readily transformed into cursive letters, as they are made by the artist’s hands who introduces the intentional irregularity of the human gesture. Even in this aspect there is, therefore, duplicity and ambiguity; at the same place where one reads with presumed ease resides the place of the sagacious inversion elaborated by the artist.

Glauco Rodrigues’ body of work was basically forgotten for a long time, perhaps because it did not correspond or fit in an obvious way with the modernist canons of the time. However, nowadays, 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.

Glauco Rodrigues’ Kaxinawá are us! 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.