Campo de batalha: Antonio Henrique Amaral 90 anos: Curated by José Augusto Ribeiro

“I believed that ideologies, politics, the social events of the time, my love life, my feelings, the technique of printmaking, restraint in line and drawing, existential doubts – in short, all the ingredients of life – could be expressed and experienced through artistic activity.”

(Antonio Henrique Amaral, in an interview with Maria Alice Milliet, speaking about the “premonition” he had at the age of 17, that he “would follow the path of art.” Milliet, Maria Alice. “Entrevista: anos de formação, primeiros sucessos...” In: Milliet, Maria Alice (ed.). Antonio Henrique Amaral: Obra gráfica: 1957–2003. São Paulo: Momesso Edições de Arte, 2004, p. 31.)

For six decades, from 1955 to 2014, Antonio Henrique Amaral made his art a kind of battlefield – a terrain on which he waged open confrontations with aspects of both personal life and the public sphere, creating a body of work able to encompass the intensity and scope of his aspirations. In this production, the artist worked with the figurative depiction of physical and mental states – affections, pains, desires, psychological feelings, existential questions – while he also voiced dissent toward political events and practices, the disorder of urban expansion, the neglect of environmental issues, and much more. His private life, intersubjective relationships, and social contexts – his, mine, everyone’s – were always interwoven at the core of his artistic investigations, composing a single interrelated whole which proved to be explosive over the course of his career.

Driven by this impulse, Antonio Henrique, developed an outstanding body of work within the field of contemporary art, never freezing it into a single “style” or into a set of visual, technical, or methodological traits he could call his own. Instead, he preferred to work in a sort of crossfire between various artistic movements and cultural repertoires – high and low, refined and popular, national and international. In his art, he engaged, for example, with expressionism, cubism, and surrealism; with anthropophagy and Mexican muralism; with Wifredo Lam, Joan Miró, and Roberto Matta; with pop art and Tropicália; with the woodcuts of cordel literature and the narrative logic of comic books; with hyperrealism and science fiction; with street graffiti and 1980s painting – among a myriad of other movements and fields.

In contrast to this multiplicity of materials and registers, the artist would often adopt a single element – a “theme” – which, for a certain period, served as the guiding thread of his process. Reconfigured in successive works, this motif also served as a clear sign of a work in progress. Many of these signs are charged with connotations of violence, eroticism, drama, and humor: human mouths, pointing fingers, bananas, ropes, forks and knives, bamboo, crystals, daggers and blades, male and female torsos, dismembered bodies, smoke, theater stages, and hearts. They stand as signs of pleasure and destruction, of passion and torment, alternating or coexisting in scenes of intense movement, where events are shown as if through a zoom effect, in extreme close-up – pressed up against the depiction’s surface and thus very near the viewer – heightening the image’s tension and visual impact.

Through these efforts he gave rise to a broad and varied oeuvre, marked by twists and turns and generally energetic – in its gestures, scales, and figurative depictions. From the second half of the 20th century onward, this body of work furthermore gained an influential position in Brazil’s cultural scene, became important in debates on Latin American art, and made its way into the collections of various U.S. institutions, especially between 1970 and 2000. This legacy is estimated at around 2,500 works, including paintings, prints, drawings, and studies.

The exhibition Campo de batalha [Battlefield] being held now marks the 90th anniversary of Antonio Henrique Amaral’s birth (August 24, 1935) and the tenth anniversary of his death (April 24, 2015). It features more than 60 of his artworks produced between 1957 and 2011, and offers a comprehensive overview of his career. Rather than emphasizing the many facets that made his work unique, however, the show seeks mainly to highlight one of the dominant traits in his oeuvre as a whole: the alternating or simultaneous procedures of constructing and deconstructing forms – the assembly of structures from heterogeneous fragments, and the dismantling or breaking apart of units into pieces. The premise is that these operations, although they took various forms over the years, lie at the very foundation of the visual dynamism that distinguishes Antonio Henrique’s work from beginning to end.

Beginning at the very outset of his career, a kind of bestiary emerged in his early production, between 1955 and 1963, consisting of hybrid creatures – half-animal-half-plant, half-man-half-beast, half-being-half-thing – which advance across drawings, linocuts, and woodcuts, before the artist began painting systematically in 1965. These anomalous beings convey less of a sense of monstrosity than a feeling of unease, as though these metamorphoses were expressing a physical and psychological suffering, arising from fear, anguish, and even pain. In some of these works, the figures are performing, or trying to perform, some action: they are walking, fighting, and falling, under pressure. Even when the figures are apparently standing still, the twists and disproportions in their forms unbalance the image, thus referring to a change of state far removed from stability.

Antonio Henrique’s woodcuts and paintings from the 1960s recurrently involve the operation of a simultaneous fragmentation and multiplication of figures. For example, mouths: heads with two or three of them, and mouths with no head at all, placed side by side in circles or aligned diagonally, open, with teeth and tongue visible – at once speaking and mischievous. Similarly, horse hooves march together with severed human hands and feet in a procession, determined to say something while carrying placards with incomplete phrases. In paintings from the late 1980s, human bodies appear chopped into pieces – heads, mouths, teeth, hearts, fingers, and tongues – set alongside daggers and forks, piece beside piece, thing beside thing, sometimes all arranged on a theater stage, with the curtains drawn back, in full view. Cut!

The exhibition’s title, Campo de batalha, comes from a series of works Antonio Henrique Amaral produced between 1973 and 1976. Consisting mainly of paintings and drawings, this group concluded a long period in which the artist focused on the figurative depiction of bananas, begun in 1968 in allusion to Brazil’s geopolitical situation under the military dictatorship established after the 1964 coup d’état, backed by the United States in the context of the Cold War. Brazil was placed into the condition of a “banana republic,” a term coined by the American writer O. Henry in the early 20th century in a short story inspired by the relationship between Honduras and the United States – or, in particular, by the fact that the Honduran economy at the time was based on banana exports to the United States. From that point onward, the expression was applied to Latin American nations politically and economically dependent on the United States.

In Antonio Henrique’s paintings, the bananas initially appeared in a humorous vein, as Tropicália-inflected phallic symbols that were authentically Brazilian and yet pejorative, due to the implicit hint of submission. Soon after, they began to appear tied up or hanging from ropes, as the repression of the populace by Brazil’s political regime intensified. By the time of Campo de batalha, the bananas were being sliced by knives, pierced or skewered by forks, and torn apart – unrecognizable as fruit, mistaken for viscera. In the last painting of the series, Campo de batalha 35 (1974), there is no trace of a banana. Instead, a dark space – perhaps an abyss – opens between two vertical bands, or the tines of a metal fork, glinting with a cold, somber light, like the bars of a windowless cell. Violence thus occupies a space with no chance for a horizon, which was previously a place of irreverence and sarcasm.

The dense clustering embodied by the bunches of bananas at the beginning of the 1970s was soon reinforced by images of twisted metal rods (No metálico, as janelas [In the Metallic, the Windows], 1976), by geometric forms resembling crystals and sharp cones, and by row upon row of bamboo stalks – culminating in increasingly claustrophobic, congested, and shallow spaces. Significantly, shortly after this, the artist’s compositions seem to burst into splinters (as in the lithograph Crac! from 1976), releasing an energy that had seemed pent-up amid so much clutter and disorder. Yet the phenomena of agglomeration and dispersal also appear side by side later on, in the depiction of passionate themes – such as in Casal de novo [A Couple Again] (1995), where two torsos, merged into a single body, float within a vast cloud of smoke that suggests the explosion of an atomic bomb.

From the late 1990s onward, it seems that the artist’s imagery is depicting an entire world that is breaking apart, blown to pieces. Fragments of beings and objects break into pieces along the way, heading who knows where, swept off by gales and enveloped in clouds of dust. The titles of some of these works speak plainly of disagreements, losses, and an end: Carta pouco esclarecedora, lançando mais confusão sobre assuntos já contraditórios… (1999) [An Unenlightening Letter, Adding More Confusion to Already Contradictory Matters…], As partes todas em fuga, assim parecia... (2011) [All the Parts in Flight, So It Seemed...], Antes, durante e depois... da queda… (2008) [Before, During and After... the Fall…], Ao apagar das luzes (2009) [When the Lights Go Out]. As at the beginning of Antonio Henrique Amaral’s career, these images and words resonate with his internal, romantic, political, and aesthetic battles – fought with vigor and force in the making of the work. Because that always remains. And here is his work today, still in combat.

José Augusto Ribeiro

¹ In 1967, Antonio Henrique published the album of woodcuts O meu e o seu, accompanied by a text by poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar. The work consists of seven prints featuring, among other elements, scenes of incommunicability, authoritarian gestures, the expression of intimate thoughts, and calls for peace and prosperity as rallying cries. In these prints, graphic and chromatic experiments point to new directions that would prove important in the artist’s subsequent production – through a synthetic, direct line that fills the paper’s surface with repeated elements, and through the choice and combination of strong colors, in contrast to the predominance of black and white in his earlier graphic work.

² During this period, Antonio Henrique lived in the United States on several occasions, held numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and took part in various group shows, especially of Latin American art, at institutions in both the United States and Latin America. During this time, various important museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City incorporated his works into their collections. Furthermore, a significant portion of the artist’s production from the 1980s and 1990s is currently held by private collections based in the Americas.

³ In a text for the catalog of an exhibition featuring works by Antonio Henrique at Galeria São Paulo in 1985, writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão transcribed a statement by the artist about the moment he first got the idea for the bananas: “Maybe it was the phallus from O rei da vela [José Celso Martinez Corrêa’s 1967 staging of Oswald de Andrade’s play at Teatro Oficina, in São Paulo] – that cannon, remember? Or perhaps the atmosphere of mockery that I began to notice: the military coup, Institutional Act No. 5, the Feira Paulista de Opinião [São Paulo Opinion Fair] criticizing everything – I went onstage holding a giant banana – the political unrest. (…) From that, the banana was born. We were at such a low point in Brazil, marginalized. Nothing was serious. The idea was to take seriously the idea of not being serious.” In this passage, Antonio Henrique is referring to his sculpture 1964: O desabrochante, shaped like a peeled banana, which was presented at the Feira Paulista de Opinião, produced by Teatro de Arena in 1968. At that time, the press published at least two photographs of the work, which is now lost: one where the artist is standing in front of the sculpture alongside the band Os Mutantes, and another showing the musicians and composers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso beside the piece.