‘Some May Work as Symbols’

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980.

It’s a nice idea, but the modernist paintings on display here are still the real draw. A deep black Lygia Clark circle, shattered squares by Judith Lauand, juddering reliefs by Lygia Pape, stacks of triangles by Ivan Serpa, tumbling blocks by Helio Oiticica; it’s so joyous, so wild despite its geometric rigidity, so full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past. 

Mixed in among all that is a whole heap of flat perspective, faux-naive figuration. Heitor dos Prazeres paints women in striped dresses dancing in the street, Silvia de Leon Chalreo depicts workers toiling in a field, Madalena Santos Reinbolt weaves scenes of countryside festivities. This is all as joyous as the abstraction, but more rooted in the traditions and truth of life in rural Brazil.

Full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past.

So your job as you walk through the show is to try to follow the tangled threads that connect the ultra-simplistic rural figuration with the minimal modernism. It jars a little, feels incongruous, especially because it’s too broad, like an over-ambitious attempt to sum up the entire artistic output of a whole country over 30 years. It just doesn’t work.

Two artists hold the key to figuring it out though: Reuben Valentim and Abdias Nascimento. It’s in their work that the two sides of mid-century Brazilian art come together. Nascimento’s totemic imagery toys with the symbolism of Candombele spiritualism, creating semi-symmetrical ritual works filled with hyper-coloured feverish creatures and gods, because objects of devotion in the process. Valentim’s compositions riff on religious symbols too, but to more abstract ends, like he’s creating psychedelic flags for futuristic tribes or nations as yet unborn.   

It’s in these two artists that the past and the future, the rural and the urban, the radical and the traditional, get synthesised. They’re what makes the show work.

But the whole thing’s great. It’s a gorgeous, in-depth, museum-quality exploration of creativity at its most fertile, modernism at its most exciting and abstraction at its most beautiful.