Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting by Gilda Vogt

Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting

Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa

São Paulo, 2005 METALIVROS

© 2005 Metavídeo sp Produção e Comunicação Ltda. all rights reserved editorial and graphic coordination Ronaldo Graça Couto texts Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa works Dudi Maia Rosa art and graphic design director warrakloureiro editorial and graphic management Bianka Tomie Ortega

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text revision Across the Universe Communications

introduction, 11 the deaths of painting, 15 what is postmeta painting?, 39 Dudi Maia Rosa, 50 annex, 165 biographic aspects, 185 bibliography, 187

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Art and advertising flirt with two verbs: inspire and communicate. Does advertising inspire in order to communicate? Does art communicate inspiration? On these two points rest our intentions. F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi supports Brazilian contemporary artists because of the tradition attached to its name, and out of gratitude for how these artists inspire us with their work. It is with great pride that we are sponsoring this publication, out of gratitude for the transparency and color with which Dudi Maia Rosa illuminates us when showing his work at our agencyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s headquarters in SĂŁo Paulo.

I am only free when my will, basing itself critically and philosophically on that which exists, is able to formulate a basis for new phenomena. kasimir malevich, Non-Objective Art and Suprematism, 1919

introduction In writing about the painting of Dudi Maia Rosa, I am tempted to put the word painting in quotes, but the reader would soon find that tiresome. Nevertheless, one of the characteristics of Maia Rosa’s painting is that it is not, strictly speaking, painting. Regardless of what we call it, I will argue that it is a creative response to the constraints faced by an artist with a painterly vocation who is also of his time. More specifically, it is an attempt to reconcile a compulsion to paint with an intuition of the limits of traditional painting as a language for dealing with contemporary problems. “To be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore.”1 Before discussing the nature of Maia Rosa’s particular response, I will attempt, in chapter 1, to survey some of the “deaths” of painting, particularly what I see as the two most recent: the crisis of metapainting — painting whose subject is painting itself — in the 1950s, and the more general crisis that lasted approximately from 1968 (a turbulent political year in Europe and the United States) until 1982, when Rudy Fuchs’s Documenta vii put painting back on center stage. Chapter 1 will be illustrated by quotations (many more colorful than pictures) from artists, art historians, and philosophers, while chapters 2 and 3 will be illustrated by images. If postmodernism can be said to exist — and this is one of the issues we will examine in chapter 1 — were any of these deaths a symptom of the transition from modernism to postmodernism? If, instead, postmodernism is a narcissistic illusion, what then compelled these ruptures in the continuity of modernism? Or were these ruptures them-

selves an illusion, the result of cultural wars achieving rhetorical autonomy while all around them artists continued to enjoy the application of substance to surface, sometimes with vital and groundbreaking results? In the early 1980s, when Maia Rosa’s work achieves its defining contours, painting was beginning to recover its artistic currency. The marketplace excitement that greeted this return of painting was similar to that which greeted Pop art in the 1960s. In both cases, the art market welcomed the return of representational subject matter, more easily digestible by collectors than the opposing swings of the pendulum represented by gestural abstraction in the 1950s and minimal and conceptual art in the 1970s. Some of the new painting, however, contained an awareness that something had changed, that innocence, and to some extent modernist idealism had been lost. In the 1950s and 1960s, some of the new painting was a response to metapainting, and I will examine some of these pioneering responses in chapter 2. For convenience, and with tongue partially in cheek, I will call it postmeta painting. In the 1980’s, in contrast, the return of painting was a manifestation of horror vacui, a response to the displacement of painting by the new media — happenings, installations, performances, photography, video, land art. Much of this new painting was a nostalgic and uncritical recuperation with little apparent consciousness of contemporary issues — loose cannons taking advantage of loose canons. There was a reprise of metapainting, and even reinterpretations of earlier movements, such as expressionism. But there was also

critically engaged painting, including Maia Rosa’s work, which built on the interrupted achievements of postmeta painting. It is my hope that the first two chapters will attract readers who might not otherwise have become aware of Maia Rosa’s work. Conversely, I hope the placement of his work within the context described in those chapters will provide, to those already familiar with his work, a more complete appreciation of its relevance. In chapter 3 we will examine how Maia Rosa’s work arose from his immediate context — São Paulo in the 1970s — and how it dealt with the diminished possibilities for critical and creative painting. This was by no means a smooth process. Like tiptoeing in the dark, Maia Rosa’s evolution had its share of hesitations and false turns. It was also not intellectually driven; there was no declaration of intent, manifesto, political agenda, or stated ideology. It was — and remains — a process filled with experimental disquiet, with a trail of euthanised work. It is far closer to the traditional cliché of the artist as sensitive receptor — Ezra Pound’s “artists are antennas of the human race” — than to the contemporary cliché of artist as career strategist and academically trained master of fine arts. Art historians inevitably curate art history, and while it is tempting and possible to portray Maia Rosa’s history as a formally coherent evolution, the deviations were a necessary ingredient of the successes, and will be included and discussed as such. The chapter will also look at an interesting aspect of Maia Rosa’s work, which is how his distinctive material — resin-coated fiberglass — functions as a “signature.” Everything trapped in this “amber” becomes, recognizably, the property of this artist. By eliminating any hypothetical need for a signature style or subject matter, the artist is free to loot the histories of both representational and abstract art without loss of visual identity. In ways quite different from the self-referential aspect of 1950s modernist painting examined in chapter 1, the medium here is the message, though never the entire message. Walter Benjamin once expressed the desire to produce a book that would be composed entirely of quotations.2 Such an approach would have the virtue of reduc-

ing the number of value judgments committed by the author, although they would still be present, inevitably, in the choice of quotes. So I intend to quote — and extensively — since I believe as a matter of principle that you should not care about my opinions, only about the information that I have collected as input for your value judgments. The fact that some discretion went into selecting the quotations should not stand in the way of them being used as you see fit. In addition to representing a contribution to the death of the critic (a humorous misunderstanding of Barthes’s much-misunderstood “death of the author”), the extensive use of quotations is also consistent with my subject, who quotes extensively both in his work and conversation. Jargon is occasionally inevitable, particularly when quoting, but I will do my best to avoid it; I will include a definition whenever this effort fails. Duchamp knew the value of being enigmatic, a charm of which I hope this book is incapable. I have great respect for academic conventions, and have tried to follow them in matters of procedure, but I am not an academic. This book presents a personal view, and is unconcerned with tenure. In writing it I was able to count on material gathered during conversations with many people who gave generously of their time. The artist himself was a constant inspiration, and I can only hope that the timbre of this approach honors our dialogue of almost twenty years. No writing can do justice to Maia Rosa’s work; for that, a composite of this and many other approaches will be required. I hope this is the first of many. The artist’s son, Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, was invaluable at every stage of the process and responded promptly to every request for information, clarification, or photographs. He wrote to me moving words about his father, and I hope someday he can bring himself to publish his privileged observations. I owe much of the energy for this engagement to the fact that the enthusiasm of both father and son was unrelated to whether my views coincided with theirs. I should probably add a disclaimer at this point: as a longtime collector of Brazilian art, over the years I have been able to acquire several works by Maia Rosa. I was tempted to exclude them from this discussion for obvious reasons, but this would have detract-

ed, even if slightly, from the book. Instead of doing this small disservice to all, I prefer to think that these works remain much more the artist’s than mine. Carlos Fajardo, José Resende, and Antonio Dias shared their insights about the formative context for Brazilian art in the 1960s and 1970s and the situation of painting at the time. Rodrigo Naves, Alberto Tassinari, and Ivo Mesquita were kind enough to hear my outline and comment on it constructively and helpfully. Rodrigo Naves was kind enough to read the manuscript and provide generous encouragement, invaluable given how his conception of Brazilian art, his prose, and his professional independence have long stood as an example for me. Since each of the people I spoke to had a considerably different take on the period, the responsibility for any inconsistency in my narrative is entirely theirs (while the merit of any coherence I have managed to spin out of this confusion is, of course, entirely mine). My father, Sergio Corrêa da Costa, was the second victim of the Portuguese language manuscript, and offered me the benefit of his professional ear for language and temperamental eye for redundancy. The enthusiasm and encouragement of Luciana Brito and Fabio Cimino made this book possible. To Lilian Tone’s beneficial influence over the years I owe a more rigorous critical mindset, a slightly improved sense of what not to say, and a regrettably belated preference for nouns over adjectives. To my daughter, Olivia Costa, who opened previously unsuspected territories of feeling, I owe more than I can ever hope to express.

1 Roland Barthes, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990), p. 243. 2 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, uk: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), p. 9.

the deaths of painting There can be no question of painting in Suprematism; painting was done for long ago, and the artist himself is a prejudice from the past.1 kasimir malevich, 1920 And they come and talk — to us of painting, they come and remind us of that lamentable expedient which is painting.2 andré breton, 1928 I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane, and there is to be no more representation.3 alexander rodchenko, 1939 Painting is finished; we should give it up.4 barnett newman, final dos anos 1930

I do not understand painters who, whilst declaring themselves receptive to contemporary problems, still stand in front of a canvas as if it were a surface needing to be filled in with colors and forms, in a more or less personalized and conventional style.5 piero manzoni, 1960 We are witnessing today the exhaustion and the ossification of all established vocabularies, of all languages, of all styles. (…) Easel painting (like every other type of classical means of expression in the domain of painting and sculpture) has had its day. At the moment it lives on in the last remnants, still sometimes sublime, of its long monopoly.6 pierre restany, 1960

I have no more doubt that the era of the end of the picture has been decidedly inaugurated. For me, the dialectics surrounding the problem of painting evolved, together with the experiences (the works), towards transforming the painting-picture into something different (for me, the ‘non-object’). It is no longer possible to accept development ‘within the picture,’ the picture has already become saturated. Far from being the ‘death of painting,’ this is its salvation, since actual death would be the continuation of the picture as such, as the ‘support’ for ‘painting.’ (…) The problem of painting is resolved by destroying the picture, or its incorporation in space and time.7 hélio oiticica, 1961 I am completely sure that the plane (rectangle) is in crisis — Mondrian, the greatest of them all, did with the rectangle what Picasso did to the figure. Exhausted it once and for all (…). It is a crisis of structure — not formal structure, that has always been there, but total structure — the rectangle is no longer adequate as a vehicle of expression. Just hang it on a wall and it automatically establishes a subject/object dialogue (representation) by its very position…8 lygia clark, 1964 I’m merely making the last painting which anyone can make.9 ad reinhardt, 1965

The trouble with painting is not its inescapable illusionism per se. But this inherent illusionism brings with it a non-actual elusiveness or indeterminate allusiveness. The mode has become antique. Specifically, what is antique about it is the divisiveness of experience which marks on a flat surface elicit.10 robert morris, 1966

I think there is a long modernist tradition of endgame art — starting with dada and the suprematists (if you like), and a lot of artists have made the last painting ever to be made. It’s a no-man’s land that a lot of us enjoy moving around in, and the thing is not to lose your sense of humor, because it’s only art.14 sherrie levine, 1986

Formalist critics and artists alike do not question the nature of art, but as I have said elsewhere: ‘Being an artist now means to question the nature of art.’ If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it.11 joseph kosuth, 1969

Warhol (…) had to work through the last phases of the pictorialization begun by Rauschenberg and Johns, and go to the threshold of painting’s abolition, a consequence which would soon emerge, mediated to a considerable degree by Warhol’s work, in the context of Minimal and Conceptual art.15 benjamin buchloh, 1989

The systematic, single-minded, persistent attempt to rid painting once and for all of its idealist trappings lends Ryman’s work its special place during the 1960s as, again, ‘just the last paintings anyone can make.’ (…) If we remember that it was Stella’s earliest paintings that signaled to his colleagues that the end of painting had finally come (I am thinking of such deserters of the ranks of painters as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris), it seems fairly clear that Stella’s own career is a prolonged agony over the incontestable implications of those works (…).12 douglas crimp, 1981

Between 1966 and 1968, in New York and elsewhere, Robert Huot, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Jan Dibbets, Mel Ramsden, Lawrence Weiner, and others produced their ‘ultimate’ monochrome or acted out a variation on the blank canvas before they switched to Conceptual art. Their Conceptual works are intelligible and can be appraised only in reference to the abandoned craft and medium of painting, which, unfortunately for those artists, is precisely what they sought to escape, since they predicated their works on the ‘logic’ of Modernist painting while refusing to let them be aesthetically evaluated with respect to painting.16 thierry de duve, 1990

[After Conceptual Art] Art practice was no longer to be defined as an artisanal activity, a process of crafting fine objects in a given medium, it was rather to be seen as a set of operations performed in a field of signifying practices, perhaps centered on a medium but certainly not bounded by it.13 victor burgin, 1986

I didn’t think when I said thirty years ago that painting was finished that it would be so thoroughly finished. The achievement of Pollock and the others meant that the century’s development of color could continue no further on a flat surface. Its adventitious capacity to destroy naturalism also could not continue. Perhaps Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still were the last painters.17 donald judd, 1993 It is both amusing and pathetic that about once every five years the death of painting is announced, invariably followed by the news of its resurrection. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain truth hidden in this swinging of the pendulum — otherwise the phenomenon would have ceased long ago. Is it not symptomatic that just shortly after the invention of photography, Paul Delaroche prophesied the death of painting for the first time? This certainly points toward one of the causes, not of the actual death of painting — there is no such thing — but rather of the feeling that painting was under threat. This feeling is as old as modernity, and (…) was expressed periodically all along the history of modern painting. It is still with us.18 thierry de duve, 2003 The death of painting has been on order since Manet, and the task of every modern artist is to try to achieve it. That is what modernism as I know it is all about.19 yve-alain bois, 2003

Why has no one announced the death of sculpture, or drawing, or printmaking? The need to kill painting — generally the dominant mode of visual art since Giotto — can be understood as the need to kill the father, an internal psychodrama as old as humanity. But neither the need to do so, nor the impression of having done so, mean the deed was ever truly done. Because painting, of course, cannot be killed, anymore than playing the drums or writing a book can be killed. When Reinhardt claimed to have made the last painting anyone can make, he was claiming to have reached the end of a historically determined process, characteristic of modernism, in which a medium — in this case painting — ceased to function as a vehicle for expressing worldly content and became, instead, only about painting, a self-sufficient object, free of reference to anything outside itself. After Reinhardt, no formal advance was seen as possible; the formal limit of painting as a language, the flat monochrome, had already been reached. Painters might still have things to “say” about the world, but to do so they would have to take a step back, formally speaking. Since the internal dynamic of the avantgarde would never allow it to step back, it became a widely held view that painters were no longer capable of being avant-garde. The entire concept of avant-garde is, of course, problematic; to be avant-garde was often considered self-justifying, and the question “avant-garde of what marathon or what army?” was rarely asked. In fact, one of the claims made for postmodernism as a distinct condition was that it did not believe in an avant-garde. In any case, there is a problematic tautology20 embedded in many claims made by participants in cultural wars, and it typically goes like this: first you develop an ethical rule, for example, “to be relevant, a work of art must innovate,” then you reify21 the rule so that its subjective nature is forgotten, then you apply the rule to your value judgments so that you only admire works that innovate. Another example would be “to have integrity, a work of art must be true to its materials,” so that only works of art in which materials behave “naturally” have integrity.

The most influential tautology of the post-war period was associated with Clement Greenberg, according to whom painting, in order to maintain its integrity under the onslaught of popular culture (kitsch), must purge itself of everything extraneous to the medium of painting, such as narrative, representation, and illusionistic space. The outcome of this compelling ethical rule was that only reference-free painting without illusionistic space had integrity because integrity required these characteristics. It is not surprising that this kind of semantic trap can bite the hands that feed it, leading inexorably to a formal dead end. The one history of painting progresses from the painting of a variety of ideas with a variety of subjects and objects, to one idea with a variety of subjects and objects, to one subject with a variety of objects, to one object with a variety of subjects, then to one object with one subject, to one object with no subject, and to one subject with no object, then to the idea of no object and no subject and no variety at all.22 ad reinhardt

It must be said that Greenberg’s crusade to entrench painting in its area of competence was often misunderstood as justification for a logical process that led to its death, but that was the last thing Greenberg wanted; Greenberg loved painting, and wanted it to live forever in a constant but nonseditious state of formal investigation. His coolness towards Reinhardt and Stella, as well as minimalism, was perplexing to some observers. Above all things Clement Greenberg is the critic of taste. (…) How else can one account for, given his theories — if they have any logic to them at all, — his disinterest in Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and others applicable to his historical scheme? Is it because (…) their work doesn’t suit his taste?23 joseph kosuth (…) Greenberg’s failure to accommodate so-called Minimal Art might be seen as a failure of nerve in face of the logic of his own position.24 charles harrison e paul wood

Despite the damage he inflicted upon illusionistic space, Greenberg deserves better. His reserve was perfectly consistent because Reinhardt and Stella were crossing the Rubicon to a point of no return, while minimalism was doing away with painting altogether. The testing of formal limits may be an essential part of modernism, but should operate like Zeno’s paradox, in which you never arrive by always travelling ninety-five percent of the remaining distance. But art history doesn’t care for such niceties, and so far has preferred Reinhardt and Stella to painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Larry Poons, defined as exemplary by Greenberg in Modernist Painting (1960). So, despite all the efforts to kill painting, and all the claims to have done so, we are faced with the historical fact that painting has remained alive and, in many cases, well. But it is also a historical fact that certain kinds of painting were widely perceived to have died, particularly in the 1950s, and in the period lasting roughly from 1968 to 1982. If so, what was the painting that continued to be made? A zombie, a clone, a cyborg? Was the painting that came roaring back in the 1980s a recycled Lazarus? Or were those deaths contests of power expressed through language, and painting never even became bedridden? Since painting is still playing in theaters everywhere, we need to look more closely at some of the ways in which these deaths were framed.

Our first interpretation, especially applicable to the 1950s, is to understand the death of painting as that of a very specific kind of painting whose mission was to test its formal limits. Some 1950s and 1960s practitioners, such as Reinhardt and Stella, with their black (an appropriate color for mourning) paintings, did, indeed, paint themselves into a corner. Those who didn’t — Louis, Noland, Poons, and Olitski — have declined in art-historical relevance. The painters with the biggest impact — Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Lichtenstein — (re)turned to figuration, but this was a figuration without representation, devoid of illusionistic space, consistent with formalist painting’s interest in painting as thing rather than language. But abstract painting continued to be made throughout this time, even of the formally investigative kind. Some of it was brilliant and relevant, even when functioning as an elegiac coda or performing a rear-guard action. [Robert Ryman] is perhaps the last modernist painter, in the sense that his work is the last to be able graciously to maintain its direction by means of modernist discourse, to be able to fortify it if necessary, but above all radically to undermine it and exhaust it through excess.25 yve-alain bois

A second interpretation, especially applicable to the late 1960s to early 1980s, is that what died was not painting itself but its historical preeminence. Though sculpture has always been a fundamental medium, it is hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of artists considered prominent were painters, and that the dominant mode of artistic expression in the last three centuries was oil on canvas. But beginning in the late 1960s, there was a growing sense that painting as a whole — be it abstract or figurative — was an antiquated or outdated mode of expression. The majority of avant-garde manifestations took the form of performance art, body art, land art, happenings, and three-dimensional objects that often used materials untainted by associations to fine arts (and claimed to be neither painting nor sculpture). Many of these works were ephemeral, leaving only documentary photographs and videos as “footprints,” so it was probably no coincidence that, in a nearly simultaneous development, photography and video established themselves as legitimate media for “fine” artists, as well as photographers and film makers. So this particular death of painting can be seen as the end of its dominance and the birth of pluralism in artistic media. A third way to consider the paradox, paraphrasing Yve-Alain Bois’s account of Hubert Damisch’s position,26 is to think of painting as a game in which matches come to an end, but never the game itself. Throughout history many matches have already been played, and there are several taking place right now. Matches can happen simultaneously or in sequence, and each match is played according to its own, historically determined rules. For example, in the match called surrealist painting, the manifest objective is to record the hidden life of the subconscious through its visual manifestations. In the match called formalist painting, the objective is to purify the medium and “entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” by gradually excluding everything extraneous, such as narrative, representation, and spatial illusionism. The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive (…).27 ad reinhardt

In the match called formalist painting, the limit situation is a white monochrome28 and not a blank canvas because this is the game of painting and a blank canvas bears no paint. If this distinction seems academic, think of the difference between a bare white chest and a white shirt; the blank canvas belongs to the category of readymade, a player in the broader game of art-in-general. All art matches, including painting matches, are governed by a set of metarules: you must start with a set of conventions, you must establish credibility through a convincing underlying discourse (through your persona, your words, or the words of your supporters), and you must develop and challenge those conventions. The important premise here is that the game of painting can never end as long as anyone remembers the rules of any of its matches and continues to play those matches (it only takes one to play). The impact of ideology on the game — or any other concept — of painting is, of course, crucial. The rules that govern painting matches and the moves that take place within it, are reflective of, if not determined by, cultural context. Consideration of the impact of ideology is beyond the scope of this project, but I will briefly revisit the topic when examining whether there is such a thing as postmodernism. All art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it’s entirely a game.29 francis bacon

To summarize, the recurrent deaths of painting can be interpreted in at least three different ways: as the tautological death of a specific kind of painting, such as the death of metapainting in the 1950s; as the end of painting’s dominance as a medium, a widespread notion starting in the late 1960s; or as the end of a specific match, to be followed by other matches. The first two views are fundamentally historicist — implying a chain of cause and effect over time — while the third is more Moebiuslike. Although in hindsight the deaths of painting can be explained, diminished, or even dismissed as fact, they cannot be ignored as events. Most avant-garde artists perceived them as true, and to the extent that they took place in their minds, and in those of many other participants in the game of art, they fundamentally altered the course of art history. Much subsequent painting acknowledged and responded to these apparent impasses; whether or not they were justifiable is academic. Dudi Maia Rosa’s approach was, certainly, a response to the challenged state of painting in the 1970s, a decade during which the medium seemed at its most bankrupt. Pop painting had already lost its drive, and most critical attention was being directed at alternative media (and out of print, out of mind). What brought painting to this impasse? What cumulative “traumas” pushed it against the wall? We have at least five candidates for the role of executioner: the development of photography (Daguerre30, 1839), of mechanical reproduction (Klic’s pho-

togravure process, 1879), of abstraction (Kandinsky, 1910), of the readymade (Duchamp’s bottle rack, 191431), and of the monochrome (Malevich, 1918). Photography liberated painting from objective representation of external reality. Mechanical reproduction, by disseminating pictures of paintings, undermined the need for direct experience. Abstraction outmoded painting as subjective representation of external reality. The readymade undermined the need for craft, fusing Leonardo’s “pittura è cosa mentale” (painting is something mental) with Duchamp’s disdain for retinal art. The monochrome, finally, checkmated even the representation of internal reality, leaving self-referentiality — Reinhardt’s “art-as-art” — as avant-garde painting’s last option. Of all these factors, perhaps the readymade was the last to ‘register,’ so far ahead of its time was Duchamp’s gesture.

Like the readymade, none of these developments was traumatic in real time, but rather sent waves into the future that only slowly percolated into the fabric of canvas. (…) the avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic — a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately, at least not without structural change. (This is the other scene of art that critics and historians need to register: not only symbolic disconnections but failures to signify.)33 hal foster

(…) the readymade (…) is a message of which Duchamp is merely the messenger, an announcement whose content reads: It is now technically possible and institutionally legitimate to make art out of anything and everything. (…) Conceptual art made it possible to be an artist without being a painter, but then only with this proviso: that Conceptual art signals the moment when Duchamp’s message was received, not when it was sent.32 thierry de duve

The first wave of monochromes (including those of Malevich and Rodchenko) pushed the lessons of Cubism and Kandinsky to their reductive limit and opened a “hole in the symbolic order” that, for the most part, failed to signify because the art consuming public was not yet prepared for abstraction, much less for monochromes (particularly when they were being made by Russians intent upon building an ideal society on the ashes of capitalism). The climate for abstraction remained hostile during the “return to order” years of the late 1920s and 1930s, and it was only after World War ii that it emerged as an accessible esthetic for the tastemaking classes of western Europe and America. As a result, the 1950s brought a second wave of monochromes (from Manzoni, Fontana, Kelly, Klein, Reinhardt, Stella) with more widely accepted fathers to kill: tachism in Europe and abstract expressionism in the United States. These monochromes were seen to have taken abstraction once again to its limit, perhaps to an even further limit because they were largely free of the socialist idealism that marked the first wave. It is certain that through the problematic of abstraction, American painters [of the abstract expressionist generation], just as already in the 1920s the exponents of suprematism, neoplasticism, purism, etc., could nourish the illusion that, far from being engaged merely in a single match that would take its place in the group of matches making up the game of ‘painting,’ they were returning to the very foundations of the game, to its immediate, constituent données. The American episode would then represent less a new development in the history of abstraction than a new departure, a resumption — but at a deeper level and, theoretically as much as practically, with more powerful means — of the match begun under the title of abstraction thirty or forty years earlier.34 hubert damisch

It is only within this “problematic of abstraction” that the death of metapainting could ever arise since it is a crisis of formal innovation, and formal innovation was less critical in representational painting. The incorporation of Marx and Freud gave surrealism a legitimate claim to avant-garde status, but supporters of abstraction saw surrealist form as formally conservative and outdated. Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. (Footnote: I owe this formulation to a remark made by Hans Hoffman, the art teacher, in one of his lectures. From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore ‘outside’ subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium.)35 clement greenberg I would cast out all expressionist, dadaist, futurist, and surrealist art. They don’t fit in with art-as-art at all.36 ad reinhardt In the field of visual production, there is no doubt that Surrealism was characterized by the preservation of antiquated formal schema connected to the perspectival order. (…) But it’s impossible to ignore the Surrealist operation in the cultural field: the questions raised by the critical mechanisms of Breton and Bataille often make the theorizations of Seuphor and later, Max Bill, seem infantile and reformist.37 (…) Surrealism raised decisive issues for art practice, including: the issue of desire within production, the relationship between art and politics, the solidarity of the institution of art and bourgeois order, the Freudian unconscious, etc. (…) Dada put in check not just the language of art, or the function of art, but above all the statute of art, the established modes of relation between the work of art and life in society.38 ronaldo brito

To the defenders of abstraction, insult was added to injury when contemporary art turned to the spiritual heirs of the figurative strain of modernism — earning them the label neo-dada — for a way out. The total capitulation to representation signaled by the advent of Pop art in 1962 precipitated a crisis of major proportions. The bastion of abstraction had at last been breached.39 diane waldman

In fact, this categorical abyss between the abstract and the representational is one that many artists, such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, began to challenge. Even within the abstract lineage there were always fundamental oppositions. Before World War ii, the principal divide was that between a rational, functional, geometric, materialistic strain that saw itself as instrumental in the development of society (exemplified by most members of the Bauhaus, Soviet Constructivism, Concrete Art) and an irrational, expressive, informal, spiritual strain that sought access to psychological and emotional states (as in abstract Surrealism, Klee, Kandinsky). Some manifestations managed to straddle both: Neoplasticism, that “jewel of idealist thought,” aspired to “a universal plastic language, based on vertical/horizontal structures, from which the greatest possible dose of subjectivity would be banished,” yet remained dependent “on the traditional plane of esthetics — art conceived not as a field of knowledge inside a political and ideological field but as a search, as a spiritual adventure, or at most as a formulation of universal immanence.”40 Mondrian’s search for universal harmony was mystical at root, so he “was only able to formulate its theories of production upon metaphysical bases, inside the magic circle of art and outside History (…).”41 The important point, however, is that pre-War strains of abstraction were ultimately42 about something external to painting. While the origins of gestural abstraction lay in surrealism, with its roots in the subconscious, after World War ii western artists became increasingly interested in works that are (thing) rather than say (language), works that are only about themselves, that exist only as part of reality rather than as a representation of it.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. adolph gottlieb e mark rothko, 1947 There is no such thing as a good painting about something. ad reinhardt, 194743 Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.44 carl andré I’m interested in things that suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I’m interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments. (…) you do one thing and then you do another thing (…) What I think this means is, that, say in a painting, the processes involved in the painting are of greater certainty and of, I believe, greater meaning, than the referential aspects of the painting. I think the processes involved in the painting mean as much or more than any reference value that the painting has.45 jasper johns The invention of the readymade seems to me to be the invention of reality, in other words, the radical discovery that reality in contrast with the view of the world image is the only important thing. Since then painting no longer represents reality but is itself reality (produced by itself).46 gerhard richter

Another reason for painting to shy away from external reference was the overwhelming manner in which photography and mechanical reproduction took over this task, in a way that privileged marketing over esthetics. The young Clement Greenberg, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), defended the retreat towards a higher plane as the only way for the avant-garde to escape contamination by kitsch. It is ironic that Greenberg, a man of the left, became the most notable apologist for, in effect, banishing political content from art. First he supported the abstract expressionists, who were often more interested in the sublime than in the material, and whose formalism was impregnated with metaphysics (when not contaminated by figures, such as de Kooning’s women). Next, he championed the Color Field school, whose formalism was satisfyingly self-referential. But art that could only signify the sublime or itself lost much of its capacity for social critique, an alienation welcomed by those who felt that social engagement soiled the purity of art. After the Second World War, art that celebrated the ineffable, itself, or consumer culture — abstract expressionism, formalism, and Pop (despite the latter’s quota of irony) — became ideal commodities for export and internal consumption, while politically engaged art became anathema. After the heroic years of Abstract Expressionism a younger generation of artists is working in a new American regionalism, but this time because of the mass media, the regionalism is nationwide, and even exportable to Europe, for we have carefully prepared and reconstructed Europe in our own image since 1945 so that two kinds of American imagery, Kline, Pollock, de Kooning on the one hand, and the Pop artists on the other, are becoming comprehensible abroad.47 henry geldzahler

In case it appears I am overstating the role of United States capitalism (…), let me emphasize the obvious, that the history of modern art from its beginnings was nurtured within a number of industrialized societies, not just America. Looking closer at that history, with its ‘artfor-art’s sake’ ideology, we become conscious of the everincreasing role played by a neutered formalism — at the expense of our possibility of content. (…) The tradition of formalism has left me largely incapable of expressing through ‘my art’ those very things about which I have the greatest misgivings — and so incapable of changing anything through ‘my art.’ These ideological fetters have conclusively eradicated every possibility of a social practice in relation to art, even the thought of it — the expression of modern art has become the rejection of society and of our social beings. Now, obviously the United States isn’t to blame for all of this, but it certainly deserves a lot of credit for bringing it to a remarkable and unprecedented pitch. No longer just producing art for a privileged middle class, it has burgeoned into a spectacularly elitist art, remote even from its own producers’ actual lives and problems.48 ian burn (Art & Language) But by the 1960s, the days of purely formalist art were already numbered. Cultural selection is similar to natural selection in that the fittest art survives, and fitness means the ability to achieve institutional placing. In this contest, formalist painting proved no match against the relatively painting-free movements — Minimal, Process, Povera, Performance, Land, and Conceptual — that came to prominence at the time. The jump into object making was the logical outcome of the exhaustion of the picture plane, an exhaustion that, as we have seen, Greenberg never desired, but that was seen to follow from his premises.

Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors — which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.50 donald judd (…) during the 1960s, painting’s terminal condition finally seemed impossible to ignore. The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt’s claim that he was “just making the last paintings anyone could make” or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupture with painting’s unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism; in all those other mediums to which artists turned as, one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that had always resisted even painting’s most dazzling feats of illusionism — time — now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities, as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance.51 douglas crimp

(…) painting that represents nothing is attracted to the sphere of objects (…).49 ferreira gullar

That’s why I (…) painted photos, just so that I would have nothing to do with peinture: it stands in the way of all expression that is appropriate to our times.52 gerhard richter When you think that it is in 1951 that Fontana did his first pierced monochromes, Rauschenberg his seven white panels, and Kelly his white reliefs, you come to think that there is another crucial episode, here, on an international scale, in the recursive history of the monochrome. As always, it was an attempt at finding a way out of a crisis in abstract painting by jumping into the third dimension.53 thierry de duve (…) in the 1960s [there was a] specific sense that minimalism consummated one formalist model of modernism, completed and broke with it at once; (…) Judd reads the putatively Greenbergian call for an objective painting so literally as to exceed painting altogether in the creation of objects.54 hal foster There is a sense in which the reductionism underpinning the promulgation of the art object, as well as subsequent moves to ‘dematerialize’ the object, can all be read as a continuation of, rather than a movement beyond, Modernist essentialism.55 charles harrison e paul wood

By 1968, a year of great political upheavals, painting in general, even Pop painting, seemed relatively anachronistic, and any artist coming of age during that period — such as Maia Rosa — would have had to hold a skull in his hand and ask “to paint or not to paint?” If he or she chose the former, the choices would be to paint as if nothing had happened, or to paint as if something had happened. This “something” is an elusive quantum, like a subatomic particle that cannot be observed but whose existence is inferred from its impact on other particles. The prime suspect is the alleged passage from modernism to postmodernism, a notion that seemed fairly well accepted in the 1980s, but that now seems increasingly under fire. The following quotes give us a flavor of the rise and apparent fall of the concept of postmodernism. [With Courbet’s] quarrels with the Salon of 1851, (…) I would venture to say, something called the avant-garde began.56 thierry de duve (…) vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art.57 charles baudelaire (to Edouard Manet, 1865)

Manet’s ambitions are fundamentally realistic. He starts out aspiring to the objective transcription of reality, of a world to which one wholly belongs, such as he finds in the work of Velasquez and Hals. But where Velasquez and Hals took for granted their relation to the worlds belonged to and observed and painted, Manet is sharply conscious that his own relation to reality is far more problematic. And to paint his world with the same fullness of response, the same passion for truth, that he finds in the work of Velasquez and Hals means that he is forced to paint not merely his world but his problematic relation to it: his own awareness of himself as in and yet not of the world. In this sense Manet is the first postKantian painter: the first painter whose awareness of himself raises problems of extreme difficulty that cannot be ignored: the first painter for whom consciousness itself is the great subject of his art.58 michael fried I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant (…). The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself — not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.59 clement greenberg

The all-purpose picture plane underlying (…) post-Modernist painting has made the course of art once again non-linear and unpredictable. What I have called the flatbed is more than a surface distinction if it is understood as a change within painting that changed the relationship between artist and image, image and viewer. Yet this internal change is no more than a symptom of changes which go far beyond questions of picture planes, or of painting as such. It is part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.60 leo steinberg Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative. (…) Octavio Paz, a fellow traveler of modernity, noted already in the middle of the 1960s that ‘the avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those of 1917. We are experiencing the end of the idea of modern art.’61 jürgen habermas Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization — these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors. (…) This deconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernist art in general and must be distinguished from the selfcritical tendency of modernism. Modernist theory presupposes that mimesis, the adequation of an image to a referent, can be bracketed or suspended (…). When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence.62 craig owens

The avant-garde artist has worn many guises over the first hundred years of his existence: revolutionary, dandy, anarchist, aesthete, technologist, mystic. He has also preached a variety of creeds. One thing only seems to hold fairly constant in the vanguardist discourse and that is the theme of originality. (…) Now insofar as [Sherrie] Levine’s work explicitly deconstructs the modernist notion of origin, her effort cannot be seen as an extension of modernism. It is, like the discourse of the copy, postmodernist. Which means that it cannot be seen as avant-garde either. (…) Because of the critical attack it launches on the tradition that precedes it, we might want to see the move made in Levine’s work as yet another step in the forward march of the avant-garde. But this would be mistaken. In deconstructing the sister notions of origin and originality, postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the conceptual domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf that in turn establishes a historical divide. The historical period that the avant-garde shared with modernism is over. That seems an obvious fact. What makes it more than a journalistic one is a conception of the discourse that has brought it to a close. This is a complex of cultural practices, among them a demythologizing criticism and a truly postmodernist art, both of them acting now to void the basic propositions of modernism, to liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condition. It is thus from a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist origin and watch it splintering into endless replication.63 rosalind krauss

Andy Warhol’s work (…) turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the CocaCola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statement. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.64 fredric jameson Late modernism stood for order — the obedience to function of the International Style, the respect for ‘specificity’ and ‘tradition’ in Greenberg’s aesthetics — everything in its proper place, doing its duty, fulfilling its preordained role in patriarchal culture. (…) It seems likely that ‘conceptualism’ is destined, for the moment at least, to be represented as that ‘movement’ which, by undermining ‘modernism,’ paved the way for post-modernism. (…) I have been using the expression ‘post-modernism’ to refer to art produced after Greenberg’s late-modernism lost its ideological hegemony — the moment of conceptualism and after. (…) ‘Modernism’ came in with the social, political, and technological revolutions of the early twentieth century and is to be characterized by an existentially uneasy subject speaking of a world of ‘relativity’ and ‘uncertainty’ while uncomfortably aware of the conventional nature of language. The ‘post-modernist’ subject must live with the fact that not only are its languages ‘arbitrary’ but it is itself an ‘effect of language,’ a precipitate of the very symbolic order of which the humanist subject supposed itself to be master.65 victor burgin

Modern art puts the accent on psychic unlinking, on the pulverizing of the image. From this point of view, it evokes the experience of a sort of pre-narcissism in our psychic life. Postmodernism, trying to gather together the pieces of this representation, evokes, on the other hand, a moment of the psychic makeup when, under the influence of the erotic drive or of death anxiety, the subject attempts to unify the ego. Let’s say that modern art insists upon the individual as fragmented, wandering, at loose ends, as one who cannot find himself in the mirror of any ideology. It seizes this moment of fragmentation in a gesture that does not give it meaning but is, in its very formal existence, a gesture of fleeting sovereignty and of momentary enthusiasm. Postmodernism, on the other hand, tries to integrate this wandering in an eclectic unity, containing regressive elements to be sure, but constituting a step beyond the idea of an avant-garde as it imposes a content and the elaboration of a mediation.66 julia kristeva

(…) if minimalism breaks with late-modernist art, by the same token it prepares the postmodernist art to come. (…) [After minimalism] the object of critical investigation becomes less the essence of a medium than ‘the social effect (function) of a work’ and, more importantly, the intent of artistic intervention becomes less to secure a transcendental conviction in art than to undertake an immanent testing of its discursive rules and institutional regulations. Indeed, this last point may provide a provisional distinction between formalist, modernist art, and avant-gardist, postmodernist art: to compel conviction versus to cast doubt; to seek the essential versus to reveal the conditional.67 hal foster (…) the return to the figurative order we are now witnessing [is a symptom] of the crisis of modernist discourse today. (…) Although [Robert Ryman] is claimed by some as a postmodernist, I would say he is more accurately the guardian of the tomb of modernist painting, at once knowing of the end and also knowing the impossibility of arriving at it without working it through.68 yve-alain bois I will focus on three moments thirty years apart within the twentieth century: the middle 1930s, which I take to be the culmination of high modernism; the middle 1960s, which mark the full advent of postmodernism; and the middle 1990s.69 hal foster

Inasmuch as Modernism is tied up with specificity, it may be over [in the 1960s] (…) [Minimal and Conceptual] artists sought to pursue Modernism — Modernist art, not Modernist painting — beyond the threshold of the blank canvas, while seeking to halt Formalism — the necessity of aesthetic judgement — on that very threshold.70 thierry de duve (…) the subject pronounced dead in the 1960s was a particular one that only pretended to be universal, only presumed to speak for everyone else. (…) In a sense the modern incorporation of (…) otherness allowed for its postmodern eruption as difference.71 hal foster

(…) Whatever happened to postmodernism? Not long ago it seemed a grand notion. For Jean-François Lyotard postmodernism marked an end to master narratives that made modernity appear synonymous with progress (the march of reason, the accumulation of wealth, the advance of technology, the emancipation of workers, and so on), while for Fredric Jameson postmodernism prompted a renewed Marxist narrative of different stages of modern culture related to different modes of capitalist production. Meanwhile, for critics committed to advanced art, it signaled a move to break with an exhausted model of modernist art that focused on formal refinements to the neglect of historical determinations and social transformations alike.72 hal foster [In the 80s] we had worn down one of the great experiences of that century, which was modernism. Maybe the label ‘postmodern’ is overrated and doesn’t mean much anymore, but nevertheless modernism was available to be consumed.73 john armleder (…) so-called postmodernism: Not a single argument has ever convinced me that such a thing actually exists.74 yve-alain bois

Before we brush off postmodernism as dead — like painting, it may live to fight another day — it may be useful to list some of the infrastructural and superstructural factors that might be symptomatic of the condition characterized as postmodern. Infrastructural — There was a shift from a predominance of manufacturing to a predominance of services. — Much of modernism took place in a dualistic world of capitalism and communism; the gradual dissolution of the latter leaves commercial media (especially television) unchallenged as the dominant disseminator of values. — The shift from a colonial mindset (the direct exercise of power) to a post-colonial mindset (the direct exercise of seduction) is deceptively recent, and underlies multiculturalism and the rewriting of art history to include previously marginal countries as legitimate participants.75 — Computers allowed stock exchanges to grow exponentially; the search for new stocks to trade leads to growing interest in emerging markets, which in turn fosters greater institutional and academic interest in their cultures. Superstructural — Modern art believes in an avant-garde, postmodern art does not; the very notion of the avant-garde presupposes the idea of progress, a dubious analogy to science. — Originality is a requirement of the avant-garde; the dominant postmodern mode is pastiche. — In modernism, the new was interesting by definition, something the not new could never hope to be; in postmodernism, a work need not be new to be interesting. — Modern art tends to interpret art history in linear, historicist terms (see, for example, Alfred Barr’s “torpedo”); postmodernism looks at art history as non-linear and strategic, closer to a spiral or loop. — Modernism is seen as driven by an internal logic; postmodern art rejects this. — Modernism tends to value self-expression; postmod-

ernism considers it a myth associated with the grand authorial gesture. — Modern art was radical, revolutionary, shocking, and begged the question “is this art?” It was utopian and idealist in ways that postmodern art rejects. — Modern art is “high” culture, an antidote to kitsch; postmodern art embraces the “low” and effaces the distinction. — Modernism respects the integrity of each medium; in postmodernism, artists mix media, and use words as art (not literature), and photos as art (not photography). — In the games of modernism there are rules, even if only for the purpose of being broken; in the games of postmodernism there are no rules, except the rule that says “no rules.” — Modern artists have signature styles or iconographies, and are media-specific; postmodern artists are eclectic, free to be both abstract and representational, and mix media. — Under modernism, there was a divide between abstract and representational art; under postmodernism, abstraction is just another form of representation. — Under modernism, painting was alive and well and dominant; under postmodernism, it is a resurrected entity. — Modernism is patriarchal, exclusive, geographically polarized, culturally local, and drawn towards the real; postmodernism is genderless, inclusive, global, multicultural, and attracted to the hyperreal. — After World War II modernism became the official culture, an internal contradiction that made it incapable of its critical historical mission. — Modernism believed in the perfectibility of mankind through technology and rationalistic planning, whereas Lyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” — The modernist esthetic stresses the immanent features of the work of art, whereas postmodernism sees it as a cultural text to be deconstructed as part of a critical subject/object relation. While some of the above points may be polemical, the list as a whole makes a fairly compelling case that funda-

mental changes have indeed taken place, although one could argue that things never stopped changing, even during the period of undisputed modernism. But it is arguable, with hindsight, that postmodernism was a misleading term for a new phase of modernism, one quite different from the previous phase or phases. Characteristics previously considered essential to modernism may have been essential only to that phase of modernism. Of all people, Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is one of the fundamental tracts on postmodernism, appears to lay the matter to rest. What, then, is the postmodern? (…) It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. (…) A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. (…) A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.76 jean-françois lyotard

In Lyotard’s account, Impressionism was once postmodern, and so were Cubism, Suprematism, and every other movement that challenged pre-established rules. But if postmodernism is just a misleading label for the current state of modernism, we are still left with the question of what kind of painting reflects it. One of the possible answers, associated with Yve-Alain Bois, is that contemporary modernity is a condition of endlessly reworking the end of painting, always flirting but never consummating, a situation that will persist as long as the underlying structures of capitalist society continue to hold. One of [Ad Reinhardt’s] last statements reads: ‘If I were to say that I am making the last paintings, I don’t mean that painting is dying. You go back to the beginning all the time anyway.’ (…) Hence (…) his constant invocation of a ‘tradition’ of the ‘last painting’: ‘I often feel I’m inventing a new language, the language of Manet, Monet, Mondrian, Malevich.’77 yve-alain bois One did not have to wait for the ‘last painting’ of Ad Reinhardt to be aware that through its historicism (its linear conception of history) and through its essentialism (its idea that something like the essence of painting existed, veiled somehow, and waiting to be unmasked), the enterprise of abstract painting could not but understand its birth as calling for its end. (…) Mondrian endlessly postulated that his painting was preparing for the end of painting — its dissolution in the all-encompassing sphere of life-as-art or environment-as-art — which would occur once the absolute essence of painting was ‘determined.’78 yve-alain bois

(…) One is struck by the fact that [Mondrian] never felt any compulsion toward the monochrome, which could easily have provided, so it seems, the kind of absolute flatness he was striving for. But as an iconoclast readymade, the monochrome could not have functioned for him as a tool to deconstruct painting or more specifically to deconstruct the order of the symbolic in painting (of tradition, of the law, of history). (…) But is the end ever to be gained? Duchamp (the imaginary), Rodchenko (the real), Mondrian (the symbolic), among others, all believed in the end — they all had the final truth, all spoke apocalyptically. Yet has the end come? To say no (painting is still alive, just look at the galleries) is undoubtedly an act of denial, for it has never been more evident that most paintings one sees have abandoned the task that historically belonged to modern painting (that, precisely, of working through the end of painting) and are simply artifacts created by interchangeable producers. To say yes, however, that the end has come, is to give in to a historicist conception of history as both linear and total (i.e., one cannot paint after Duchamp, Rodchenko, Mondrian; their work has rendered paintings unnecessary, or: one cannot paint anymore in the era of the mass media, computer games, and the simulacrum). (…) One can conclude then that, if the match ‘modernist painting’ is finished, it does not necessarily mean that the game ‘painting’ is finished: many years to come are ahead for this art. But the situation is even more complicated: for the match ‘modernist painting’ was the match of the end of painting; it was both a responses to the feeling of the end and a working through of the end. And this match was historically determined — by the fact of industrialization (photography, the commodity, etc.). To claim that the ‘end of painting’ is finished is to claim that this historical situation is no longer ours, and who would be naïve enough to make this claim when it appears that reproducibility and fetishization have permeated all aspects of life: have become our ‘natural’ world?79 yve-alain bois

In this fascinatingly depressing view, the distinguishing characteristic of today’s relevant painting would be an interminable and quixotic reworking of the end, reminiscent of a battery-powered toy banging repeatedly against the wall. Assuming there is no such thing as truth — one of the sobering lessons of interpreting every cultural manifestation as a text — it may be more persuasive to picture what used to be called postmodernism as a phase of modernism that generated certain responses to changed circumstances, including the dissolution of imperatives evoked by words such as avant-garde, originality, integrity, style, progress, radical, revolutionary, shocking, linear, historicist, patriarchal, immanent, authorial. The only requirement that may not have changed, perhaps because it is more about being relevant than about being modern, is that the artists be responsive to their time. But if by relevant I mean the ability to speak to our time, I may just be committing a tautology of my own, so it’s up to the reader to decide whether such painting is, other things equal, more interesting than contemporary painting that speaks to earlier times. In conclusion, although much painting in the current phase of modernism carried on as if nothing had happened, some painters from the 1950s on began to paint in ways that acknowledged, one way or another, that prior approaches were no longer of their time. Though strikingly original, these painters were not so much focused on that traditional modernist virtue — if so they would have been better off using more contemporary media — but on reflecting the complexity and heterogeneity of their time. I believe their originality stems precisely from the success with which they do this. Purely as a shortcut, and fully aware of the clumsiness of my choice, I will henceforth refer to such painting — that is, painting that demonstrates awareness, in one way or another, of the exhaustion of the twisted trajectory that led from Courbet and Manet to Reinhardt and Stella — as postmeta painting. As discussed in the Introduction, the first wave of postmeta painting, lasting from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, was a response to metapainting. Dudi Maia Rosa is a pioneer of the second wave, starting in

the early 80s, which built on the first generation’s achievements, but was also responding to painting’s apparent obsolescence under the onslaught of new media. Before focusing on Dudi Maia Rosa’s solutions, it may be worthwhile to provide a global context for them by looking at the earlier wave of approaches that, more eloquently than any theorizing, show some of the different ways this postmeta awareness manifests itself. We are born with the sensibility of a given period of civilization. And that counts far more than all we can learn about a period. The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from an accumulated strength, the civilization which precedes us. One can’t just do anything. A talented artist cannot do just as he likes. If he used only his talents, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.80 henri matisse It is not enough, in order for there to be painting, that the painter take up his brushes again (…) it is still necessary that [the painter] succeed in demonstrating to us that painting is something we positively cannot do without, that is indispensable to us, and that it would be madness — worse still, a historical error — to let it lie fallow today.81 hubert damisch

(…) [Bram Van Velde’s] situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint. duthuit: Why is he obliged to paint? beckett: I don’t know. duthuit: Why is he helpless to paint? beckett: Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.5 The objective of this chapter is not to be comprehensive or examine each artist in depth, but to give a sense of the variety of possible answers to the challenge of painting after one of its “deaths.” Other artists could have been included, but examples from eight painters — all but one emerging in the 1950s or 1960s — should be enough to circle and charge the caravan in our effort to understand how that elusive postmeta is manifested on painted surfaces. As will become apparent, a recurring characteristic among the artists examined here is a consistent disregard for the distinction between the abstract and the representational. A second recurring feature among several of them is indexicality6. The latter concept should be expanded upon because it is important to the critiques of narrative and illusionism. An index — a stamped hand or a cast arm — is an actual trace of reality and, in the modernist value system, occupies a place of greater integrity than a representation, such as a drawn hand or a sculpted arm, which depends on illusionism, something akin to deception. Indexicality is also important to the critique of subjectivity, the idea that there was no more room for the grand authorial gesture of the white male virtuoso, embodied heroically by Picasso, and extended to Cinemascopic scale by Pollock. This disregard for manual gifts finds appropriate expression in the transfer of found images, by silkscreen or other methods, as well as in the casting of found objects. At the extreme of this disregard, the pure readymade marks the point where indexicality ceases and reality begins.

In the history of indexical works, a history in which collage and assemblage play fundamental roles, two Rauschenberg works figure prominently: Female Figure (Blueprint) of 19497, in which a sun lamp was trained on a naked model lying on a sheet of blueprint paper to create a body print; and Automobile Tire Print of 19518, in which a car with a tire dipped in paint was driven over twenty-two feet of paper. This quality of indexicality that stems from the use of pre-existing objects or images allows Rauschenberg’s transfers, Johns’s casts, and Warhol’s silk-screens to avoid the twin charges of illusionism and narrative that ordinarily attend representational subject matter. In other words, it is indexicality that allows them to be contemporary. As we will see, Yves Klein’s Anthropométries are also indexical, but with a twist. A third feature, found particularly in the pop painters, is the use of mass media imagery to reflect the iconography of their generation. To the abstractionists, the return of figurative subject matter must have seemed outrageously revisionist, but Johns and Rauschenberg were channeling the post-war, media-driven consumer culture and, appropriately, adopted serial and industrial approaches to art making. In early interviews, Johns and Rauschenberg professed an admiration for the abstract expressionists and pledged themselves to art-as-art. On reflection, this is less puzzling than it might appear because even though their works turn away from abstraction, they also avoid the traditional bag of representational tricks by seeking to privilege the “thing-ness” of things. In reality, postmeta painting is more a response to metapainting than a reaction against it. In addition to sharing modern painting’s reflection on the medium (otherwise its practitioners would adopt other media), postmeta painting, by adopting indexicality as a legitimizing practice for figuration without representation, is in perfect harmony with modernist ethics and its rejection of narrative and representation. On this basis, it also created a new tautology according to which an index possesses more integrity than a representation.

robert rauschenberg The Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 was an early warning of what was in store for art-as-art; it also anticipated — in reverse — the appropriations of the 80s that also claimed Duchampian paternity. But it was Rauschenberg’s combine paintings and transfer paintings that staked the first major flag on postmeta soil: the combines paid little heed to the autonomy of media (though not the self-referentiality) defended by Greenberg; the transfer paintings, by virtue of being indexical, reintroduced representation while avoiding the problem of illusionism. Monogram, 1955-59, even includes a paint-smeared tire, an echo of Automobile Tire Print. Rauschenberg famously described his work as operating “in the gap between art and life”; if one reasons that a rendering of a tire is closer to art, and a real tire, appropriated as a readymade, is closer to life, then a tire print occupies a space between them and suggests that the gap between art and life is perfectly occupied by — and is fertile ground for — indexicality. The found objects in the combines and the found images in the transfer paintings were all readymades at the service of a collage or assemblage esthetic, and reflected a declining subjectivity. Since all of these pioneering characteristics were still fermenting chaotically, there is something wildly free-spirited about Rauschenberg in the 1950s, particularly in the disheveled but tense coexistence of the gestural component inherited from the previous generation with the new mass media imagery. It is an uneasy but pioneering postmeta junction of the abstract and the representational.

1 robert rauschenberg Monogram, 1955-59 freestanding combine, 42 x 64 x 64” Moderna Museet, Stockholm

jasper johns What might be called postmeta in Johns’s early work is the use of readymade subject matter, drained of its linguistic function as message or narrative, purely as a pretext for painting, as a neutral vehicle for indulging its culinary aspects. Johns’s use of targets, flags, and alphabets shows a discomfort with subjective iconograph, a preference for objects over subjects. As with Rauschenberg, this expresses the new zeitgeist, and plays down the authorial gesture in favor of a cool, detached approach. This new spirit is also manifest in Johns’s use of direct casting, collage, stencils, and “actual size” mark making, indexical practices that bring the outside world back into painting without reverting to narrative and illusionism. It is pure figuration without representation.

yves klein Klein created his first Anthropométrie in 1960 by smearing a naked model with International Klein Blue9 paint and directing her movements over a blank canvas spread out on the floor. What might be seen as postmeta is the use of a body as brush to create an abstract painting with a representational accent due to the nature of the brush. Just as every brushstroke is indexical of a brush, every “bodystroke” is indexical of a body, and only repeated smearing can obscure this fact. In the abovementioned Rauschenberg collaborations, the indexical nature was left basically unaltered; Klein’s Anthropométries use the body as an active brush. As bodystrokes accumulate, the Anthropométries veer closer and closer to gestural abstraction, a movement whose symbol is, of course, the brushstroke. Part of the postmeta interest of the more active Anthropométries lies in how they test these boundaries, one genus of stroke flowing into another. The Anthropométries where the model lay motionless on the canvas are more strictly indexical. Closer to Rauschenberg and Johns, they carry less of this indexical ambiguity between representation and abstraction. Another postmeta characteristic of Klein, his interest in removing the artist’s hand, was manifested in the monochromes, in which rollers and sponges were used to hide his mark. In 1959 Klein witnessed and was fascinated by a performance of Jean Tinguely’s “Meta-matic 17”, a drawing machine. Without going so far as to become one himself, an aspiration that Warhol and Lichtenstein were soon to manifest, Klein nevertheless managed to remove himself from direct contact with the paint. The model’s body was like an automaton, subject to the artist’s instructions, without a will of its own, lying in the gap between machine and life.

2 jasper johns Target with four faces, 1955 encaustic on newspaper and collage on canvas with objects, surmounted by four tinted plaster faces in wood box with hinged front, 29 ? x 28 x 3 ?” collection Jasper Johns/The Museum of Modern Art, New York gift of mr and mrs Robert C. Scull 3 yves klein Anthropométrie (ant 130), 1960 dry pigment in synthetic resin on paper on board, 76 3/8 x 50” Museum Ludwig, Cologne 4 andy warhol Mint Marilyn, 1962 silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 20 x 16” collection Jasper Johns

andy warhol One facet of Warhol’s work that seems postmeta is the complete erasure of the artist’s hand in the rubber stamp and stencil paintings of 1961-2, his first to be completely silkscreened. The execution of his canvases by assistants is only an extension of this, the artist’s touch having already been rendered irrelevant by the silkscreen process.10 The Oxidation paintings of 1978, made by urinating on canvas covered with monochrome metallic paint, were a step back in that they again appeared to involve the artist’s hand. Warhol often expressed a discomfort with painting, going so far as to give it up entirely in 1966, but not before doing so much to prolong the longevity of the medium, an ambiguity typical of his life, image, and work. Apart from accepting portrait commissions, he maintained his decision for nearly a decade. “Warhol’s art until 1966 (…) oscillates constantly between an extreme challenge to the stature and credibility of painting and a continued deployment of strictly pictorial means operating within the narrowly defined framework of pictorial conventions.”11 Warhol also contributed to eroding the divide between the abstract and the representational, treating them as equivalent and subjecting them to identical procedures. His use, individually or serially, of the silkscreened photograph as the iconic subject pushes indexical practice and the critique of the authorial gesture even further than Rauschenberg does.

roy lichtenstein Several characteristics of Lichtenstein’s work make it a candidate for postmeta status: He represents representations, a canny way of reintroducing representation while retaining the flatness of the picture plane. He expresses a wish to simulate the mechanical perfection of the mass media. His palette of primary colors replaces the chromatic subjectivity of abstract expressionism with the impersonality of advertising. His work exhibits an uncomfortable incongruity between style and subject matter.

5 roy lichtenstein Yellow brushstroke i, 1965 oil on canvas, 68 1/8 x 55 7/8” Kunsthaus Zürich 6 malcolm morley s.s. Amsterdam in front of Rotterdam, 1966 liquitex on canvas, 62 x 84” collection Norman and Irma Braman courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Lichtenstein’s paintings of brushstrokes provide a satirical twist to the notion of indexicality. While every brushstroke is indexical of a brush, a benday dot representation of a brushstroke, even one made with a brush, loses this indexicality. It would, in fact, be just an oldfashioned rendering were it not full of the multiple ironies generated by the brushstroke’s status as the icon of expressionism and his cold, detached approach to such a hot, emotional act. Lichtenstein’s signature style also allowed him to make any subject his own. This kind of easy recognition allows an artist to loot the art historical archives, in Lichtenstein’s case for Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian. By facilitating free transit between abstraction and representation, it also helps to effect their equivalence, a task most visibly performed by Warhol and Richter, but also by Malcolm Morley.

malcolm morley Morley became known in the 1960s as one of the initiators of the photorealist movement, but accurate depiction of external reality was the last thing on his mind. His particular expression of the postmeta will-to-paint consisted of choosing a source as an excuse for painting and reproducing it without the awareness of reproducing it, a peculiar spin on the representation of representations. Morley’s procedure has been well described by many commentators: “[Morley’s] method, then as now, has been to superimpose a grid on the photographic source, and paint one square at a time, with others masked off. Since the ‘60s he has used a magnifying glass in painting the smallest grids. Frequently the canvas will be turned upside down or on its side, to interrupt the natural rhythm of the brushstrokes and break the figurative reference.”12 “[Morley] started from photographs he divided into small, square units that, after being enlarged, were painstakingly copied on canvas. Each square is painted as if it is a small, abstract painting. Rather than showing off his technical ability, Morley was concerned with recording perception, with painting what he saw. Sometimes he even turned the model and painting upside down in an effort to avoid conventional results and to disregard the traditional hierarchy between figure and background.”13 “[Morley] specializes in producing hand-painted enlargements of photos or prints by means of a system of grids. He subdivides his model into a large number of penciled squares. This grid, very much enlarged, is used to subdivide the unpainted canvas as a first step in the transposition. His next step consists in cutting one strip of grids from the model, having, as often as not, inverted it or turned it sideways so as not to be distracted by the subject. With the aid of a magnifying glass, he reproduces by hand the model square by square in Liquitex colors. In so doing he substitutes the print’s crude color combinations obtained by super-impositions of four-color plates by the juxtaposition of colors on the canvas aimed at producing retinal commingling. Since Morley ‘translates’ the print square by square, the objective relations within the picture that he ignored while painting remain unchanged.”14

It is ironic that to illustrate his work here we need to use “crude color combinations” to reproduce a chromatically much denser work that was originally made from “crude color combinations.” “By filling in the grid, square by square, [Morley] ensure[s] equality of value for all areas of the canvas.”15 This equality of value would not be a postmeta quality per se, since it was implicit in “all over” painting, but in this case it is part of the postmeta impulse to downplay authorial subjectivity. With Morley’s approach, the subject becomes irrelevant during the act of painting, and all that matters is the application of substance to surface. While the “uninformed” viewer will see the resulting image as a represented object, whoever wants to approach the artist’s intent will need to perform the requisite mental distancing. The subtle and circular point here, made in the most virtuoso and labor-intensive way, is that “It is much more difficult to make an abstract painting that is real than an abstract painting that is abstract.”16

antônio dias Dias’s first works, dating from 1962-63, reveal his awareness of the problematic state of painting. Dias avoided canvas entirely and inscribed forms and symbols from Brazilian native culture on rough surfaces he made by covering duratex17 with plaster. “With the coup d’état of 1964 [in Brazil], the political components of cultural manifestations came to the fore, and specifically formal research became secondary.”18 Dias’s subsequent and celebrated “visceral” phase, that lasted from 1964 to 1967, the early years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, is full of suggestive skulls, bones, body parts, mushroom clouds, and gas masks, but Dias maintained his distance from the traditional picture plane by attaching all manner of objects and stuffed appendages to wood and duratex supports. After moving to Europe in 1967, however, something happened that gave Dias license to use the traditional flat canvas. That something was a transition to a new kind of conceptual subject matter that bypassed the narrative problem in painting. In Paris and Milan, Dias came into greater contact with theory-based approaches, and this deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings of culture and the art circuit made him switch to a pictorial critique of systems of representation. As the problems changed, he changed, a transition that recalls John Maynard Keynes’s reply to a heckler’s complaint that he had changed his position over something: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Curiously, this postmeta solution was born from an earlier attempt by Dias to overcome the narrative problem. Around 1967-68, Dias would “paint his canvases black, then sprinkle white paint on them as an experiment in seeking, through painting, a critique through the ‘representation of non-representation.’ He would then show these canvases to various people, in vain because they always saw ‘little stars.’”19 The artist felt he had no choice but to give the people what they wanted. As with many of the other examples in this chapter, the question “is this kind of art abstract or representational?” is difficult to answer, and begs the postmeta question of whether the distinction is relevant.

gerhard richter Most people, when shown a picture of a pipe and asked what they see, would answer “a pipe” rather than “a picture of a pipe,” a point made by Magritte’s well-known painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Richter’s decision in the 1960s to paint photographs so that he would have “nothing to do with peinture”20 put him on a related path: a painting of a photograph is, by definition, representational because it depicts an object, but if it is a photograph of an abstract painting, the result will appear to be abstract. In one sense it would be even though in another it would not. As a body of work, Richter’s paintings explore this ambiguity, proposing, among other things, the equivalence between paintings of photos of representational subjects and paintings of photos of abstract subjects. Searching for a new direction, in 1976 Richter began to make what he called “sketches” of abstract paintings. “At first Richter did not quite dare consider these sketches regular paintings. They were too purely subjective, so that to turn them into paintings required distancing them by taking photographs from them, usually details, as models from which to paint. The paintings that resulted, the ‘Soft’ or ‘Smooth’ Abstract Paintings (…) are really immaculately crafted photographic paintings (…).”21 The work below belongs to this series, and its postmeta character is the abstract appearance of a representational rendition of an abstract subject. The later “free” abstract paintings were, as the qualifier suggests, no longer based on photographs, but nevertheless retained “the modulated, illusionistic, photographically based space of the Smooth Abstracts as grounds (…).”22 Though perhaps not quite as postmeta as their predecessors, the “free” versions appear spontaneously expressive from a distance, yet methodically artificial up close, akin to how a Lichtenstein brushstroke painting might appear if the benday dots were so fine that you could only detect them close to the canvas. Ambiguity as method speaks honestly to the human condition: “(…) always present is the essential paradox that out of detached and mechanical procedures, what Richter calls ‘Utopia, soul, the future, hope’ could sneak into the work, because of his belief that what nature lets

7 antônio dias Anywhere is my land, 1968 acrylic on canvas, 51 ? x 76 ?” private collection 8 gerhard richter Abstract painting, 1977 oil on canvas, 88 ? x 78 ?” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York George B. and Jenny R. Matthews, Albert H. Tracy, and Edmund Hayes Funds, 1980

Every good artist paints what he is. jackson pollock The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting. barnett newman One always paints one’s own history. gerhard richter

Dudi Maia Rosa Maia Rosa (b.1946) began to study art in 1966, the year Warhol gave up painting. At the time, the medium still remained lively thanks to the visibility of pop and its various analogues in Europe and Latin America; it was the storm before the calm. Maia Rosa began his artistic training with printmaking, particularly etching and lithography, and this process of making the inverse of the desired image would resonate nearly twenty years later when he began to make his resin and fiberglass paintings. In 1971, when Maia Rosa entered the Escola Brasil:1 painting was already in crisis. This short-lived experimental school, where he later taught, left a strong imprint on the history of art in São Paulo. It was founded in 1970 by Carlos Fajardo (b.1941), Luiz Paulo Baravelli (b.1942), José Resende (b.1945), and Frederico Nasser (b.1945), all of whom had studied with Wesley Duke Lee (b.1931), a pioneer of 1960s Brazilian new figuration. Lee had studied at the Parsons School of Design, and introduced his four students to a method of drawing detailed in The Natural Way to Draw, a book first published in 1941. Already in its thirty-first printing in 1969, this classic manual by Kimon Nicolaides stressed observation instead of technique and was known for its “blind” drawing approach, in which students drew while looking only at their subject, never inspecting the results until they were finished. It is remarkable how a book and its drawing method has had such an extensive impact on many São Paulo artists. It was used by a didactic lineage consisting of Lee in the late 1960s, followed by the Escola Brasil: in the early 1970s, and then by Carlos Fajardo, who has taught many

more students since 1974 than the previous two combined. Although the Escola Brasil: was not a painting school per se, and was both ecumenical in its avoidance of value judgements and liberal in its preference for learning over teaching, the transposition of its blinddrawing exercises onto canvas (a practice frowned upon by Fajardo) generated a representational style of painting characterized by loose linear contours imprecisely (as might be expected from a blind approach) filled in with color patches. This blind-drawing esthetic and the tropical pastel palette found in many Escola Brasil: works (and derived from Lee) is exemplified by the unique painting, Untitled. 1971, a whimsical collaboration of Lee, Nasser, and Maia Rosa — forerunner, founder, and student, respectively. (fig. 10, p. 51). Maia Rosa had three solo exhibitions that could be characterized as formative (in 1978, 1980, and 1982) before he developed his signature fiberglass medium in 1983. Banhista (fig. 14, p. 53) was included in the first of these, held at the São Paulo Museum of Art (masp) in 1978; it was one of several canvases that loosely followed a scheme of placing figures against a geometric background. Besides prefiguring the easy transit between abstraction and figuration that would characterize his later work and that seems to be an aspect of postmeta painting, this juxtaposition seems formally linked to the work of Maia Rosa’s friend and former Escola Brasil: teacher, Carlos Fajardo (fig. 12, p. 52), whose exhibition at the Galeria Luisa Strina in the same year also consisted of paintings of figures against a geometric ground. At the

10 wesley duke lee, frederico nasser, dudi maia rosa Untitled, 1971 oil on canvas, 43 x 51” collection of the artist 11 Bather, 1978 watercolor and pencil on paper, dimensions unknown collection of the artist

Every good artist paints what he is. jackson pollock The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting. barnett newman One always paints one’s own history. gerhard richter

15 Neo-Noé, 1980 acrylic on canvas, 63 ? x 118” collection Stella Ferraz 16 Angel, 1979 acrylic on canvas, 59 1/8 x 98 ?” private collection

17 Sem título, 1981 enamel on wood and plastic, ø 82 ?” collection João Sattamini/ on loan to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói 18 IO, 1981 enamel on wood with elastic bands, 47 x 82 ?” private collection

As with other artist’s shaped canvases — notably Richard Smith’s works in the 1960s — this is an attempt to resolve the problem of illusionism by taking the picture plane into space. Such solutions often prove unsatisfying because they are solutions to false problems, such as the notion that illusionism is dishonest, one of the reified tautologies mentioned in the first chapter. Even if one were to accept the legitimacy of the problem, by then this path had already been well traveled by artists like Donald Judd, whose work convincingly projected the picture plane into space, and Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, whose spatial research went even further, leading to the complete dissolution of the art object. Maia Rosa’s third exhibition, and the last before the period of principal interest for this study, took place in 1982 at the Galeria São Paulo. This was his first exhibition at a commercial gallery and his most ambitious to date. None of the eight large works followed a conventional format: four were painted wood shapes, two were canvases with wood appendages, and two were combinations of canvases. All were painted with industrial enamel instead of the usual acrylic. Enamel turned out to be an intermediate step in the progression from acrylic to resin and was, by nature, more resistant to gestural marks than acrylic. As such, it appears early in the history of obstacles Maia Rosa placed in the path of his facility or, more specifically, his gestural inclination. The enamel surfaces (figs. 17 and 18, pp. 56 and 57) were also glossy and created a more artificial look that tended toward the soon-to-be-developed resin surfaces. The Galeria São Paulo exhibition was a step in the direction of Maia Rosa’s mature work. Gestural mannerisms still anchored the works to conventional practice, while restless shapes and volumes manifested a clear desire to go beyond. In early 1983, Maia Rosa discovered the medium that provided a solution and would become his hallmark: “I saw people using fiberglass to build a car and thought it would be easy to use this material to make some free-form stretchers, because that was what I was working with at the time. I took a two-hour course and immediately made this first work. I was enchanted with

the whole inversion process because it had to do with printmaking, and transparency was a novelty that forced me to think about the inside of the picture. Since the surface was transparent, I had to think about what the inner structure would look like. It was a new way of thinking about what I had been doing, because the works in the Galeria São Paulo exhibition were more expressionistic, and I felt that I would exhaust myself if I continued in that vein. The fiberglass, then, came as a challenge to reformulate my work. And the best thing about it was that the support, the medium, the pigment, they all became one!”4 In other words, what began as an attempt to build more complex forms over which to paint was redirected into an exploration of the support itself. And in order for the support to appear, any painting would have to be done on the back. The resulting surface economy was thus imposed by the nature of the medium. The desire to paint directly on the front did not die, but rather went into hibernation and would resurface periodically, sometimes with less than happy results. Maia Rosa’s casting methods and materials have changed over time, but in the early years he would build a mold with strips of plastic, lay it on a hard surface (initially the concrete floor of his studio, then other hard surfaces, such as wooden doors, singly or in multiples, or Formica slabs, covered with anti-adhesive), and pour liquid resin, usually mixed with pigment, into the cavity. After the resin dried, he would lay sheets of fiberglass fabric over it and add a second layer of resin, usually colorless. The fiberglass fabric and the resin would coalesce into a stiff and transparent surface through which, depending on the color and density of pigment, a delicate grid would be more or less visible. During the first ten years he also added a support grid of fiberglass struts. Before discussing the works Maia Rosa created with this process, it is instructive to look at two works that, at first sight, look like precedents. Carlos Vergara (fig. 19, p. 59) was one of the pioneers of Brazilian new figuration; Self-Portrait with Carajá Indian was created in 1968. The juxtaposition of an i.d. photograph with native Brazilians reflects Vergara’s

19 carlos vergara Self-portrait with carajá indian, 1968 painting on cast acrylic, 31 ? x 49 ? x 6” collection Gilberto Chateaubriand/mam-rj 20 ron davis Ring, 1968 Fiberglass and pigment impregnated in polyester resin, 56 ? x 11’4” The Museum of Modern Art, New York

condition as a cosmopolitan artist living in a major urban center, part of a culture that is based on advertising and built on the elimination of a previous culture. The use of cast acrylic gives this work an appearance not unlike Maia Rosa’s work and similarly requires painting from the back, but the style of the graphics, combined with the smooth industrial-quality casting, mimic commercial signage. Vergara uses the material not so much as part of an investigation of its possibilities but as a vehicle for synthetic narrative. From 1966 to 1972, Ron Davis (fig. 20, p. 59) created cast resin and fiberglass works that come remarkably close to Maia Rosa’s in their method of execution. Davis’s works were made in the years when Greenbergian post-painterly abstraction was in evidence, and seem equal parts “hard edge” and “fetish finish.” Though contemporary in their use of industrial material, these seductive works extend traditional modernist practice, so much so that Davis nostalgically returned to canvas in 1972, and has never again looked forward. In contrast to Maia Rosa’s decision to leave his surfaces untreated, for Davis: “The front surface is machine polished and buffed to remove any minute imperfections. Finally the surface is waxed and buffed to complete the process and finish the painting.”5 In this erasure of the handmade, Davis’s works are closer to a contemporary spirit than Maia Rosa’s resin-fiberglass monochromes, with their allegiance to the truth of the material. On the other hand, Davis’s work was part of the fifties and sixties tradition of painting-about-painting, while Maia Rosa’s works, because of their later date, could not help being a commentary about such metapainting. In fact, the detachment afforded by the resin-fiberglass medium was cathartic. By giving him license to reenact a personal and selective history of modernist painting, it allowed him to work through and exorcise his influences, a wrenching and anxious process. Maia Rosa began at the end — the monochromes exhibited in 1984 and 1985 — and worked backwards, rummaging the past in the “doors” exhibition of 1986. With two year’s worth of monochromes, why was it necessary to revisit the death of painting that had concerned previous genera-

tribulations of an artist’s life — economic pressures of the market, the wayward attention of critics, and the oscillating attention of curators — the picture of internecine conflict remains incomplete. To return to the works, the first two mature resinfiberglass pieces had already been completed when Maia Rosa received a studio visit in August of 1983 from Thomas Cohn, Rio de Janeiro’s most important dealer at the time. Cohn had liked an earlier work by Maia Rosa at a group show in 1982,9 and had been introduced to him by the artist Leonilson, a friend of Maia Rosa’s who had recently shown at Cohn’s gallery. Impressed with the two new works, Cohn acquired both on the spot and scheduled a one-person show of resin-fiberglass works for

24 Untitled, 1983 polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ?” collection João Sattamini/ on loan to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói 25 Untitled, 1983 polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, ø 82 ?” collection Augusto Livio Malzoni

22 Untitled, 1983 polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 67 x 193 ?” collection Renata Mellão 23 Untitled, 1983 polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 78 ? x 226” collection Gema Giaffone

April of the following year. Encouraged in this new direction, Maia Rosa completed at least two more works in 1983.10 These four works ran through basic geometric shapes (apart from the traditional square and rectangle), including the oval, the diamond, the equilateral triangle, and the circle (figs. 22 to 25, pp. 62 and 63). Notable in the above four works is the decreased amount of graphic activity and, consequently, the increasing clarity of appearance — the red circle is practically pure color and structure. The structural support rods clearly and inevitably perform a graphic role, but there is an additional and delicate crisscrossing of fiberglass fabric threads, not visible in photographs, that would be drowned by brushwork.

26 Goetheanum Building, Dornach, Switzerland, 1924 front window, Rudolf Steiner (architect) 27 Façade of the Waldorf School in Santo Amaro, São Paulo 28 Anthroposophical window, 1983 polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 82 ? x 96 ?” collection João Sattamini/ on loan to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

A completely transparent work (that is, without pigment) seemed like the next logical step. Transparency brought to mind glass, glass brought to mind window, and window brought to mind Rudolf Steiner, whose teachings resonated greatly with Maia Rosa. Steiner, who was also an excellent architect, designed an iconic window for the Goetheanum (fig. 26, p. 64) in Dornach, Switzerland, the world headquarters of his anthroposophical movement11. The shape of this window has become one of the symbols of anthroposophy, and appeared on the façade of the anthroposophical school attended by Maia Rosa’s three children (fig. 27, p. 64). Maia Rosa himself became active in school affairs, participating in “many things: theatrical productions, Christmas bazaars, attending musical events, etc. He was always very involved, having been part, for several years, of a group dedicated to the study of Steiner’s work.”12 In Maia Rosa’s words: “The [anthroposophical] window came as a temptation, because I wanted to make a completely transparent work. I thought of Duchamp,13 and when I associated the school window with that singular structure, I just couldn’t resist it. I literally copied the structural design because it seemed perfect to me.”14 So much so that a second work using the same shape was made later in the same year (fig. 28, p. 65). In addition to these paintings, Maia Rosa’s first exhibition at the Galeria Thomas Cohn in April of 1984 included the following two untitled resin-fiberglass works (figs. 29 and 30, p. 66). The latter work started as a wall piece but, after a troubled manufacturing process, including a stay in Maia Rosa’s garden where it lay for days exposed to the elements, it ended up as a weather-beaten floor piece. At the time, the artist expressed his objectives as purely self-referential: “Today my work is all one piece, and is already born whole as far as structure. (…) I want to empty my ‘painting’ of any conceptual content, I want to be a painter empty of ideas, making work that is clear and crystalline.”15

29 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, ø 82 ?” private collection 30 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 84 ? x 51” collection Kim Esteve 31 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

The first exhibition of monochromes was Maia Rosa’s most successful up to that point, both critically and commercially, and he felt motivated to continue exploring the resin-fiberglass process. Over the following year, he produced a succession of monochromes in additional shapes (including two parallelograms, a semi-circle, a right-angle triangle, a second anthroposophical window, and shapes approximating the block letters M, N, O, T); eleven of these were shown is next one-person show at the Galeria Subdistrito in São Paulo in November of 1985 (figs. 31 to 33 and 35 to 42, pp. 67 to 75). The nonnarrative nature of these works requires little commentary and they stand or fall on their ability to deliver a “clear and crystalline” gestalt. This last work is an echo of IO (fig. 18, p. 57) from 1981. A comparison between the amount of graphic activi-

ty in the two versions illustrates a premise that often holds true for Maia Rosa: that the amount of gestural activity is inversely proportional to his satisfaction with the moment. When material and form combine at an early stage to achieve a satisfactory unity, the addition of gesture seems less necessary. But if they do not cooperate, there seems to be an attempt to advance the work by accumulating gesture. The amount of surface activity, therefore, seems to function like a seismograph of Maia Rosa’s anxiety or certainty, or of his confidence in the final result. This is inconsistent with the artist’s belief that “less is more,” but consistent with his notion that artistic solutions occur in the heat of manual conflict (figs. 41 and 42, pp. 74 and 75). A pristine monochrome from those years was later destroyed (more on why later), the first in several works that would, for varying reasons, meet this fate (fig.34, p.69).

32 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?â&#x20AC;? private collection 33 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection 34 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?â&#x20AC;?, destroyed. 2005 replica: 43 x 35 ?â&#x20AC;? private collection

35 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Kim Esteve 36 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Conrado Malzone 37 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

38 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Augusto Livio Malzoni 39 Untitled, 1984 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

43 Narrow Street, 1984 pencil and crayon on paper, 8 1/8 x 9 ?” collection of the artist 44 Untitled, 1985 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions (checando com a Galeria) courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino 45 Untitled, 1985 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Alvaro and Biba Magalhães 46 Untitled, 1985 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Felippe Crescenti

The Subdistrito exhibition brought Maia Rosa’s monochromatic phase to a close. The work produced later may have more convincing postmeta credentials, but these early monochromes remain unparalleled in their clarity and elegance; their slightly mottled glossy surfaces are like skin seen up close. While creating the monochromes, Maia Rosa had to restrain his graphic impulses, which were diverted to other media, such as the following work on paper, whose title is derived from the I-Ching Narrow Street (fig. 43, p. 76). Despite these small outlets, towards the end of 1985 Maia Rosa started to become restless. What I have called the replaying of the end of modernism had been worked through sufficiently for his purposes, and there was pressure from internal constituencies that were not being served. The three works subsequently created were experiments in what to do next, and were never “introduced to society” through the debutante ball ritual of a solo exhibition. The first of these experimented with an irregular grid of structural support lines. Meant to suggest the facets of a jewel,16 it looked more like a garment (fig. 44, p. 77). The second work awakened the original purpose behind the investigation of fiberglass, the construction of irregular support structures to be painted from the front. In this case it was a theatrical shape with a contoured top, similar to a proscenium arch. Partially motivated by the accumulated frustration of only painting from the back, Maia Rosa set aside the self-imposed discipline of the previous two years and began painting the front, reveling in the sudden liberty and enjoying the challenge of painting both sides. This work, looking like a semi-metamorphosed chrysalis, seems emblematic of the artist’s polarities, half cool and transparent, half gestural and multicolored. Though considered successful by many, it did not generate immediate sequels, and like most other unrequited impulses in Maia Rosa’s trajectory, this approach would manifest itself again (fig. 45, p. 77).

His third attempt at the time was a monochrome cast in the most multi-faceted shape so far, and densely marked from behind. As mentioned earlier, I believe the density of markings functions like a seismograph of uncertainty, and the same may be inferred here about the number of angles. When Maia Rosa has the viewer in mind, he writes words in reverse so that they appear normally from the front, but here the word ‘fim’ (‘end’) appears transposed, as if the artist was announcing to himself that this was the last monochrome (fig. 46, p. 77).

In a complete turnaround, Maia Rosa then produced a straightforward rectangle, his first conventional form since 1980, inspired by a Hans Arp print (fig. 47, p. 78). This was his first resin-fiberglass work featuring a composition, and generated a series later referred to as the “doors.” The adoption of pictorial content marked a significant shift in Maia Rosa’s work, and I believe it came about because of an intuition that, rather than a step back, this would be a postmeta solution thanks to the nature of resin. In other words, he did it because he could. He also realized that he no longer need avoid basic shapes like squares and rectangles; the work was so distinct that it would remain recognizably his regardless of shape or content (in a manner not dissimilar to Lichtenstein). This near-freedom from the possibility of being derivative — or its flip-side, the freedom to be pictorially as derivative as he wished — was afforded by the distinctiveness of the resin-fiberglass medium. Having first killed the father with the monochromes, the artist could now afford to honor him (part of a deeply rooted and ongoing human dialectic), so Maia Rosa took advantage of this newfound pictorial freedom to pay tribute to his influences.

True to the predicament of every artist who lives in a country where direct contact with great international art is limited, most of Maia Rosa’s influences came from books. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Maia Rosa had avidly collected the weekly installments of the Italian art publication L’Arte Moderna17 and religiously absorbed its contents (Steiner’s Goetheanum was on one of its 1970 covers).18 The artist collected a total of sixteen volumes of L’Arte Moderna, each containing between eight and ten installments, and many of the reproductions entered the artist’s vocabulary. I write reproductions and not works because “pocket” or “imaginary” museums cannot provide scale or tactility; a curious consequence of this access is that images appear in memory as glossy. To the extent that Maia Rosa’s new “doors” took a walk through the art history books, the sheen of their resin surfaces was perfectly suited to the texture of picture memory. It is here that the postmeta aspect of Maia Rosa’s work reaches full plenitude: in this freedom to move because there is no more back and forward in art history, in this license to be abstract or figurative because the distinction has lost its difference. But this can also be quicksand, particularly for the non-formulaic or non-pro-

47 hans arp Composition ii, 1958 color etching after a watercolored collage, 10 x 10” collection Márcio Maia Rosa 48 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection

grammatic artist, because the compasses (or crutches) provided by an earlier avant-garde teleology19 are no longer operative, and the field of choices becomes unprecedentedly eclectic. The second door-shaped work featured a curious indentation, with markings loosely derived from abstract expressionism (figs. 49 and 50, pp. 80 and 81). The standard door height in Brazil is 210 cm (6’ 11”), and since at this point Maia Rosa began to use one or more doors, side by side, as a platform for casting, his works are often 210 cm tall or wide. By adopting this readymade shape for these new works, he was also adopting a basic casting module; by repeating it, he could focus his attention on content. But the serial repetition also introduced a mechanistic element that bothered some of the internal constituencies alluded to earlier. When Thomas Cohn visited Maia Rosa’s studio in early 1986 to discuss their next exhibition, he took an immediate liking to these two new doors. The artist had envisioned exhibiting a few monochromes, together with some or all of the transitional works discussed above, and a single wall of the new doors. But Cohn was not keen on what he perceived as lack of clear direction. According to Maia Rosa, Cohn was “very enthusiastic about this new work front” (referring to the doors), but suggested that the earlier transitional works were functioning as an “anchor, as something harmful to my process.”20 Cohn found the chrysalis-like work so conclusive of its type that he wondered “‘what kind of show would it be if the best work was the oldest or one of the oldest?’ meaning that it would appear impossible to evolve if the ‘best’ work was the first.”21 As a result, Cohn proposed a show consisting only of doors, to which the artist reluctantly agreed. Over the next several months Maia Rosa cast an additional twelve variations, and in October of 1986 a show consisting exclusively of fourteen doors opened at the Galeria Thomas Cohn in Rio de Janeiro. For maximum impact, they were all clustered on two of the exhibition room’s four walls (figs. 51 to 61, pp. 82 to 85).

49 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection 50 mark rothko n o 8 (White Stripe), 1958 oil on canvas, 81 ? x 91 ?” private collection (shown sideways)

57 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” collection of the author 58 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection 59 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection 60 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection 61 Untitled, 1986 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?” private collection

62 carlos fajardo Untitled, 1969 formica on plywood, 28 ? x 71” collection of the artist

64 barnett newman Dionysius, 1949 oil on canvas, 67 x 49” National Gallery of Art, Washington gift of Annalee Newman, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

63 alfredo volpi Façade elements and little flag, 1960s tempera on wood, 42 ? x 28 ?” private collection

One inspiration for the doors was an important body of Formica works developed by Carlos Fajardo (fig. 62, p. 86) in the late 1960s, of which Maia Rosa owns an example. While Maia Rosa’s doors were not inspired by specific works (with the exception of the Arp print), they are saturated with art-historical memory, as if drawing on a collective esthetic unconscious with a Brazilian bias. The following works by Alfredo Volpi (fig. 63, p. 86), Barnett Newman (fig. 64, p. 86), Max Bill (fig. 65, p. 86) and Serge Poliakoff (fig. 66, p. 86) are offered as examples of resonance. I believe that Maia Rosa’s doors represent one of the more individual and satisfying postmeta solutions to the painting dilemmas discussed earlier, and are, as such, important to the evolution of Brazilian painting. But not all the artist’s internal constituencies were pleased. Although the artist was proud of the doors, they also represented the detachment of idea from execution, a separation that preoccupied even Donald Judd: “An artist is certainly not without ideas and principles but these cannot be completely formulated beforehand, before the work is developed, and then simply embodied. It is an essential of art that the process of making it and the use of

65 max bill Four groups from the same color elements, 1972 lithograph, 25 1/3 x 19 ?” edition of 75 (Marlborough Graphics) 66 serge poliakoff Composition, 1969 gouache on paper, 8 ? x 12” courtesy Koch Gallery, Hanover

all that comprises it influences, suggests and enforces ideas and qualities.”22 In addition, so much pigment was used in these works that the transparency of the resin was no longer in evidence. To the artist, these opaque surfaces, devoid of tactile or graphic activity, felt somehow wanting. These qualms were fueled when Wesley Duke Lee, still an artistic father figure and someone who, in Maia Rosa’s words, “relied on his graphic Colt 45 to resolve any problem,”23 referred to the series as “refrigerator doors.”24 These scruples, combined with lingering frustration at having been diverted from front-painted works, gave birth to an increasingly unsettled state of mind. When Leonilson saw the chrysalis at Subdistrito sometime in 1986 or 1987, he was very moved, and this encouraged Maia Rosa to paint the front of an earlier white monochrome with which he had grown dissatisfied (fig. 34, p. 69). But the attempt was unsuccessful, and ultimately Maia Rosa destroyed it.25 In retrospect, this was the inauspicious beginning of a difficult period in the artist’s career that included his participation in the 1987 São Paulo Bienal and two one-person shows at Subdistrito in 1989 and 1991.

Invited to exhibit as part of the Brazilian contingent at the 1987 Bienal, Maia Rosa‘s creative pendulum swung away from the pristine order of the doors, in clear reaction to their misperceived sterility. Pulling all the stops, he exhibited one enormous (200 x 500 cm), and eight large (240 x 210 cm) works.26 All but two were heavily painted, or hatched, on the front. As a whole, the group exhibited an eclectic variety of approaches and techniques, and there was nothing facile about the evident struggle and uncertainty involved. My sense is that the experimentation was not, for the most part, as successful as Maia Rosa hoped. All except the last work, Amor/Roma, feel like the results of empirical research that had not yet found what it was seeking. Symptomatically, the largest work was literally a collage of aborted works, as if combining insufficiencies could generate sufficiency. The reception was muted, noticeably among foreign curators with the power to mount international surveys, and Maia Rosa felt this acutely. It seemed that by working on the surface, Maia Rosa was taking away part of what made it distinctive rather than reaffirming his artistic identity, as he felt he was doing. There was greater, if not excessive, graphic activity on display, and this seemed to signal anxiety that comes from a suspicion of insufficiency (fig. 67, p. 89). Maia Rosa himself sensed that something was not quite right: “In the 1987 Bienal I felt like a fly beating against the window. It was a watershed. The chrysalis (approach) gave me the option of saying ‘if it goes wrong on the back I can always fix it on the front.’ As a result, in the Bienal works, I made a rule out of this fix. These were confusing times, hard on my pride and on my convictions. I entered a gray zone.”27

67 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?” collection Monica Radomysler

Even the two black and white works in the show managed to look busy. The black one was cast with resin mixed with black pigment, then hatched on the front with a burin28 (fig. 68, p. 90). The white, one of only two without surface treatment, was made using an interesting process: it was cast with unpigmented resin, and after drying was heavily drawn on the back with a graphite stone. A layer of resin mixed with white pigment was poured, followed by the fiberglass fabric, creating a multi-layered graphite sandwich29 (fig. 69, p. 92). An intriguing work bearing the inscription Não Mate o Mandarim30 (Don’t Kill the Mandarin) (fig. 70, p. 93) featured what would henceforth become a leitmotif for the artist: a rectangular plaque or slab, either blank or inscribed. The last work to become ready in time for the Bienal — Amor/Roma (Love/Rome) (fig. 71, p. 95) — provided a happy ending. While working on it, Maia Rosa made a discovery that would provide more texture to his surfaces, resolving an aspect that had previously bothered him — their quasi-industrial smoothness. Up to this point, Maia Rosa had been pouring the pigmented resin on his studio’s concrete floor, or on one or more door-size wooden slabs, guaranteeing a certain flatness to the final surface. For Amor/Roma, Maia Rosa placed a sheet of cellophane over the ground of wooden slabs before pouring the resin and laying down the fiberglass. As the resin and fiberglass bonded and dried, the heat generated by the reaction between the cellophane and the resin wrinkled the surface randomly. After peeling off the cellophane, the result was accepted as a kind of “truth of the material.” This process allowed him to make tactile surfaces and deal with the “refrigerator door” objection without recourse to the culinary arsenal of peinture. Most importantly, the result was intrinsically satisfying, so there was no need to paint or hatch on the front. The words amor and roma contain, of course, the same sequence of letters; only the asymmetry of the R prevents them from being mirror images of each other. There is also a Magritte-like playfulness about a de Kooning-esque gestural abstraction containing the words ‘Pop Art’ — written for the viewer because they appear straight from the front — next to a pair of kissing profiles.

68 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?” collection Pedro Henrique Lopes Borio 69 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?” collection Pedro Henrique Lopes Borio 70 Untitled (Don´t kill the mandarin), 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?” collection Thomas Cohn Gallery

Maia Rosa’s next one-person exhibition only happened two years later, and the larger than usual interval was due, in part, to his gradual dissociation from the Galeria Thomas Cohn, a development that added to the economic and emotional difficulties of those years. Opening in September of 1989, his second show at Subdistrito featured nine works: an abstract triptych, one triangle, two figural verticals, four abstractions, and a square white monochrome branded with the word ‘Lucifer.’ Three of these works, along with one from the 1987 Bienal, were subsequently destroyed by the artist, a clear symptom of his dissatisfaction. All were worked on from the front as well as the back, and experimented with epoxy resin because Maia Rosa was becoming increasingly intoxicated by fumes emanating from the polyester resin. In the end, epoxy was disappointing; it was less toxic, but softer, milky, took longer to dry, and was significantly more expensive. As with the 1997 Bienal works, a variety of new techniques were on display, but these still seemed more indicative of unfulfilled needs than of a sure-handed experimental bent. Borrowing a technique from etching, Maia Rosa wrapped metallic papers around two of the abstract works and then corroded the first with nitric acid, and the second with sodium perchlorate (a caustic salt); (figs. 72 and 73, pp. 97 and 99). Since the resin remained unaffected by the acid and the salt, the second of these was also subjected to the “gentle” ministrations of a blowtorch. In this exhibition Maia Rosa made explicit reference to his religious beliefs for the first time. He did so with two figural works that I find less successful because of the degree of gestural density and graphic instability. The first was St. John the Baptist (fig. 74, p. 100), and both the saint and the symbolism of baptism are particularly important to Maia Rosa’s faith. It was made by painting with acrylic over a surface formed by pouring epoxy resin on colored sheets of paper (a yellow sheet and a green sheet remain clearly visible near the top).

72 Untitled, 1989 epoxy resin, pigment, gold metallic paper and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

73 Brazilian imagination, 1989 epoxy resin, pigment, silver metallic paper and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

74 St. John the Baptist, 1989 acrylic on epoxy resin, paper and fiberglass, 82 x 52â&#x20AC;? collection of the artist

100

75 Untitled, 1989 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 39 ?â&#x20AC;? collection Ricardo van Steen

101

74 St. John the Baptist, 1989 acrylic on epoxy resin, paper and fiberglass, 82 x 52â&#x20AC;? collection of the artist

100

75 Untitled, 1989 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 39 ?â&#x20AC;? collection Ricardo van Steen

101

77 Untitled, 1989 polyester resin, paper, ink, graphite and fiberglass, each 39 ? x 39 ?â&#x20AC;? collection Rodolfo Nugents Family

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105

Maia Rosa’s next one-person exhibition opened two years later, in October of 1991, also at Subdistrito. The disastrous Collor Plan of March 1990 had frozen all checking accounts and bank deposits, making that year the annus miserabilis of recent Brazilian history. The art market had ground to a halt, both in production and consumption. “There was a sad climate in the air, and João Manoel Sattamini (the owner of Subdistrito) was very ill.”33 The artist sees this as the most difficult period in his professional life, and some of the works shown testify to this condition. “Nearly all the works allude to religious issues, particularly death. Even the invitation was a picture of a dead Christ, and was later destroyed.”34 Nevertheless, the technical searching continued, and a new development was on display: plaster surfaces cast over a resin-fiberglass ground. Unhappy with epoxy, Maia Rosa also returned to using polyester resin in all the works. In Nicodemus (fig. 78, p. 107), the plaster is painted in an impressionist wash reminiscent of late Monet, and the resin-fiberglass lies entirely buried. It becomes just a base, accomplishing Maia Rosa’s original purpose in adopting fiberglass. But I believe works such as this are pyrrhic achievements, since the effacement of the resinfiberglass detracts from what is distinctive about Maia Rosa’s work. Not coincidentally, the graphic excess returns, telegraphing discomfort. Il Selo (The Stamp) (fig. 79, p. 108) marks, between scratchy patches of red pigment, the reappearance of transparency, a quality not much in evidence at the time. It was cast in a cardboard box from which it was pried loose, giving rise to its title, also an allusion to the biblical Seventh Seal. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a large plaster work, reminiscent of a headstone, with the words ‘Santo Sepulcro’ (Holy Sepulcher) (fig. 80, p. 109) carved in block letters. Maia Rosa spread plaster paste on sheets of wax paper and poured resin on this surface; the humidity of the drying plaster wrinkled the paper in a manner similar to the interaction of cellophane and liquid resin. Although the resin and fiberglass lie hidden, there is no surface painting, allowing the ridges to stand out so that the naked plaster look like a porous surrogate resin.

106

78 Nicodemus, 1991 acrylic on plaster over epoxy resin and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?” collection Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo

107

79 Il selo, 1991 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown collection Kim Esteve 80 Holy sepulcher, 1991 plaster over polyester resin and fiberglass, 86 ? x 84 ?â&#x20AC;? collection Dulce and JoĂŁo Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz

108

109

108

109

If these works lie at the beginning of Maia Rosa’s recovery of confidence in his own direction, the consolidation of this process can be seen two years later, with his next one-person gallery exhibition. Subdistrito had closed after the untimely death of João Manuel Sattamini, and Maia Rosa was invited to show at the Galeria Millan in 1983. Shortly before, he had an exhibition at Porto Alegre’s Instituto Estadual de Artes Visuais, where he cast his largest work ever directly on the gallery floor (fig. 82, p. 112). This piece shows Maia Rosa fully embracing what is unique about his work, that is, translucent resin revealing subcutaneous activity. Here the entire surface sat on a grid of wooden support bars, and was wrinkled by pouring pigmented resin onto cellophane. To be removed, it was sawed into sections, and was later reassembled for a show at the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro in 1994. This fragile work did not withstand the rigors of moving, and later had to be discarded. Coming to terms does not signify accommodation, and new techniques were on display at the Galeria Millan. A quartet of square works featured aluminum surfaces corroded by sodium perchlorate and nitric acid (figs. 83 to 86, pp. 114 to 117). Since the resin was meant

to be covered, Maia Rosa went back to working with the less toxic epoxy. For the show the gallery floor was entirely covered with a sheet of red resin and fiberglass, poured on site after covering the cement ground with aluminum paper (fig. 87, p. 119). In addition to the four aluminum-covered works and the red floor, there was a plaster monolith leaning against the wall and a surprisingly traditional oil on canvas. The monolith was the artist’s first “box,” completely filled, with no cavity in the back. The canvas, reminiscent of Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, was inspired by Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ fresco in Sansepolcro (fig. 137, p. 162), and was intended to symbolize Maia Rosa’s emergence from times of difficulty, but nearly resulted in the opposite: “My father painted it with his own body, leaving him green, and probably intoxicated, for almost three months; he became a sort of Martian complement to the red floor that he made in the gallery, and that also exuded a stink that transformed that cubicle into a small chemical hell.”37 Maia Rosa was unhappy with this painting and how it interacted with the other works in the show and later destroyed it, his first canvas since 1982, and possibly his last (fig. 87, p. 119).

82 Untitled, 1993 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 118 x 492” destroyed

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83 Soldier i, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” private collection

84 Soldier ii, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” collection Ronaldo Graça Couto

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83 Soldier i, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” private collection

84 Soldier ii, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” collection Ronaldo Graça Couto

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85 Soldier iii, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” collection Banco Itaú s.a.

86 Soldier iv, 1993 aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57” collection Carmo and Jovelino Mineiro

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117

88 To those from Polignano, 1994 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 84 ? x 118” collection Zeca Revoredo 89 Sketch for To those from Polignano, 1994 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 1.5 x 1” collection of the author

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121

Invited to participate in the São Paulo Bienal of the following year, Maia Rosa applied the lessons from the previous Bienal and exhibited a more balanced and spare group of works, in which the particularities of the resin-fiberglass approach were fully evident. He returned to the preferred but more toxic polyester resin, and in a departure intended to emphasize the box-like quality of the works, all were leaned against the wall. The largest work (figs. 88 and 89, pp. 120 and 121), a blue monochrome with a wrinkled surface and a blank text tablet, was created by laying down a large sheet of cellophane and constructing, just above the center, a small rectangular pool into which Maia Rosa poured “some twenty liters”38 of blue resin. On drying, this resin pool wrinkled and pulled the entire sheet towards the tablet. Maia Rosa completed the process by pouring more of the same pigmented resin into the surrounding area. The work was then sealed from the back with a sheet of blue resin, making it into a box. Both the title and the aqueous blue refer to the southern Italian fishing village of Polignano, the home of Maia Rosa’s maternal ancestors before they emigrated to Brazil. Also on view were a pair of square monochromes, part of Maia Rosa’s continuing tradition of material research. The first, Para Ismael (For Ismael) (fig. 90, p. 122), was named in memory of his car mechanic, who had been horrendously assassinated at the time with “hammer blows.”39 The artist made a clay mold into which “he drove several objects, many of them metallic, such as cans, tools, and other implements, impressing the clay with a certain aggressiveness.”40 After making a plaster cast, Maia Rosa was unhappy with the resulting reliefs and, in an eerie parallel to the horrible fate of the mechanic, “grabbed a hammer and began to hit the surface of the work with great violence until there was nothing left except a memory, a ruin.”41 The second monochrome (fig. 91, p. 123) was cast by pouring red pigmented resin over a sheet of white paraffin on which the artist had scribbled a horizontal line of random numbers, barely visible above the center.

120

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90 For Ismael, 1994 plaster and clay on polyester resin, 90 ? x 90 ?” private collection

91 Untitled, 1994 paraffin, polyester resin, pigment, wax and fiberglass, 90 ? x 90 ?” collection Metropolis de Arte Contemporânea

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93 Venial, 1994 polyester resin, paraffin, pigment and fiberglass, 118 x 118â&#x20AC;? destroyed

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94 São Miguel, 1997 polyester resin, pigment, fiberglass and plaster, 80 x 40” collection Luis Perego 95 In the name, 1997 polyester resin, pigment, fiberglass and plaster, 80 x 38 ?” collection Mario Cafieiro

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The contrast between São Miguel (fig. 94, p. 129) and Em Nome (fig. 95, p. 129) may help to illustrate this. In both, Styrofoam molds were used to make plaster casts, which were reinforced with a backing of resin and fiberglass. Both plaster surfaces showed the figure of St. Michael, the patron saint of cures, but there the similarity ends. In São Miguel, gallons of turquoise-pigmented resin were poured into the plaster base, forming a pool and obscuring the plaster to varying degrees. Wherever the pool of resin is deepest, the turquoise is so dark that it appears black, even though the pigment is the same throughout. In contrast, the rough plaster surface of Em Nome was left untouched. This tonal variation is even more striking in Untitled, 1997 (fig. 96, p. 130), which appears to have two colors, but only uses one. The underlying plaster base, cast in clay, had a shallow internal perimeter, like a square frame around a square plane. Because of the different depths, the perimeter appears lighter than the deeper central portion. If there was a riddle that asked “what’s a monochrome with two colors?”, this work would be the answer. As might be expected, these were extremely heavy works. The tonal differences are also clear in Bodas (Wedding) (fig. 98, p. 131), in which, much as the tips of underwater mountains appear as islands, the white parts appear because the wine-colored resin did not submerge all the plaster. Bodas is named after Christ’s first miracle, which took place at a marriage feast in Canaan: when the wine runs out, Jesus tells the servants to fill six pots with water, which he transforms into the finest wine. This causes some guests to wonder “what kind of host is this who saves his best wine for last?” — another metaphor for the transformations Maia Rosa’s work was undergoing.xliv Not all the works in the 1997 exhibition used this resin pool technique; besides Em Nome, with its plaster surface, three others, like Ora et Labora (fig. 97, p. 130), featured resin surfaces molded in clay and then pulled from the base.

129

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129

99 Great ischemia, 1998 carbon on paper, 31 ? x 39” collection of the artist 100 Untitled, 2001 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 39 x 39” private collection 101 Narcissus, 2001 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 66 ? x 62 ?” private collection 102 Untitled, 2001 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 67 ? x 78” collection sesc São Paulo 103 Untitled, 2001 polyester resin, aluminum and fiberglass, 43 ? x 51” collection Instituto Takano

The following year, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, Maia Rosa showed a series of eighteen congested drawings reflecting his surgery and newfound sense of mortality. These works also show the artist’s graphic impulses beating strongly (fig. 99, p. 132). Unlike the four years separating the Millan (1993) and Valú Ória (1997) exhibitions, the four years that preceded Maia Rosa’s next gallery show were among the most contented and productive of his career. During this period, he was able to come to terms, in a lucid and sustained manner, with the way his sensibility and his material interacted, which until then had not always been to the satisfaction of

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either. In addition to the usual variety of approaches, the exhibition at Galeria Brito Cimino in 2001 displayed a newfound sense of homecoming, of accepting the path that sometimes appeared to have chosen him. Although the works still wear their struggles on their skins and never come close to appearing facile, they transmitted a greater sense of mastery and maturity than ever before, both individually and as a group. A wall of door-shaped works contrasted with a variety of other formats on adjoining walls, and there was a new thematic development: four works in which the frames or borders appeared to take precedence over the picture plane (figs. 100 to 103 pp. 133 to 135).

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104 Untitled, 2001 plaster, polyester resin, pigment, sheet lead and fiberglass, 45 x 65” courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino 105 Untitled, 2002 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 80 ? x 30 ?” private collection

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The heaviest work, a variation on the resin pool technique, was made by pouring pigmented resin into a clay-molded plaster box with thick white borders. Inside the box there is an inverted Z whose darkness, rather than being determined by a greater amount of resin, was the result of covering the letter with a sheet of lead (fig. 104, p. 136). One of the door-shaped works used a technique similar to Aos Polignaneses. Clear resin was poured into a smaller, separate section at the top, and this pulled and wrinkled the entire cellophane surface before pigmented resin was poured into the lower section. Like Aos Polignaneses, it was a particularly successful synthesis of many of the qualities of Maia Rosa’s work. Instead of resisting, the artist made blue and red sequels in the following year. Named after the Gilberto Gil song Expresso 2222, one of the hymns of the Tropicália movement and a symbol of Brazilianism, 2222 (figs. 105 and 106, pp. 137 and 138) is pure postmeta painting, where nothing is as it appears. Painterly matter, or the appearance of substance, derives not from accumulated layers but from the cellophane wrinkles. All painterly gesture lies buried. Conceivably a play on the distinction between abstract (hard edge and monochrome) and representational art — is this a bed or two rectangles? — these works also hint at what Maia Rosa’s 1980s monochromes might have looked like had the artist developed the cellophane wrinkling technique earlier. There is also something brazenly secure about the carnival candy colors, as if all nostalgia for the chromatic subtleties of peinture had been conclusively declared dead. This confidence carried over into an exhibition in the following year at the not-for-profit Centro Maria Antonia in São Paulo. In one of the works, the polyester resin was poured on a glass ground, creating an extremely smooth surface. In contrast to the cellophane wrinkled surfaces, this work veers close to the “fetish finish” work of the California school, and shows the degree to which Maia Rosa had been able to unburden himself of the need for surface accident. It is also one of the artist’s purest works, though it begs the question of whether purity, at the extreme, remains a virtue (fig. 107, p. 130).

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106 2222, 2001 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 80 ? x 30 ?â&#x20AC;? collection of the author 107 Untitled, 2002 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 31 x 50 ?â&#x20AC;? collection Liliana Leirner

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the outstretched arm 111 pablo picasso Guernica, 1937 oil on canvas, 137 ? x 305 ?” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 112 Torso, 1976 acrylic on canvas, dimensions unknown collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo 113 Untitled, 1978 acrylic on canvas, dimensions unknown destroyed 114 Lazarus, 1997 plaster, polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 52 ? x 69” collection Paulo R. Maia Rosa

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anjos The Anjo (Angel) (fig. 16, p. 55) from the 1980 exhibition at the Cooperativa was a precursor, in title, to three angels made after the artist returned to figurative subject matter.

115 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?â&#x20AC;? private collection 116 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?â&#x20AC;? destroyed

fig.56, p.83

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squares

117 Untitled, 1971 mixed media, 7 ? x 8 ?” collection Márcio Maia Rosa 118 Untitled, 1972 mixed media, 38 ? x 39” collection of the artist

fig.96, p.130

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juxtaposed squares or rectangles

119 Gilda, 1979 acrylic on canvas, 78 ? x 78 ?” collection Clarisse Read 120 Untitled, 1981 enamel on canvas and wood, dimensions unknown collection Lena Alcide 121 Yes, 1982 enamel on canvas, 78 ? x 78 ?” collection João Sattamini/ on loan to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

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abstractions containing profiles

yellow inclusions

122 São João com Ipiranga, 1978 acrylic on canvas, 39 x 39” collection Mary Porto

fig. 71, p. 95

fig.74, p.100

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123 Untitled, 1987 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?” destroyed

Adam and Eve

Michelangelo Maia Rosa’s painting of Christ, later destroyed, was based on a drawing he made of this Pietà while visiting the Accademia in Florence.

124 lucas cranach, the Elder Adam and Eve, 1533 oil on limewood, 68 ? x 27 ?” each Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig 125 man ray Marcel Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter as Adam and Eve in Ciné-Sketch, 1924 photograph, 6 ? x 9” courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001 126 Adam and Eve, 1991 oil on polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

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127 michelangelo buonarroti The Palestrina Pietà, c.1555 marble, dimensions unknown Accademia, Florence 128 Christ, 1991 enamel on canvas, polyester resin and fiberglass, dimensions unknown destroyed

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Piero Manzoni, from the pages of L’Arte Moderna

tablets, with or without inscriptions

The title of arobaL te arO is the same as that of its black double Ora et Labora (fig. 97, p. 130), but is written as its mirror image, as befits an inverse doppelganger.

fig.70, p.93

129 piero manzoni Achrome, 1958 kaolin on canvas, 32 ? x 26 ?” Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (Lauffs Collection), Krefeld 130 arobaL te arO, 1997 plaster, polyester resin and fiberglass, 52 ? x 47” collection Dr. Flaquer

fig.88, p. 120

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131 Untitled, 2003 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 39 x 39â&#x20AC;? collection Valentino Fialdini 132 Untitled, 1989 polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknown private collection

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cut-outs

fig.51, p.82

135 Instrument, 1981 enamel on wood with elastic bands, dimensions unknown private collection

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I have tried to show how Maia Rosa developed singular responses to the crisis of painting that lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. His work avoids earlier painting practices in recognition of their obsolescence while finding inventive ways to prolong painting as an innovative medium. Although the need to innovate is sometimes seen as a dated holdover from avant-garde modernism, human nature tends to find novelty stimulating and repetition, after a certain point, insufferable (if we hear a song we love twenty times in a row, by the twentieth time we will probably hate it, even though the song remains the same). In addition to avoiding outdated practices, Maia Rosa’s work displays several postmeta characteristics: painting behind the surface; new plastic media; free transit between abstraction and representation; absence of signature style; and art historical citation, most notably the reenactment of the transition from late modernism to postmodernism (or, if one rejects the term postmodernism, from metapainting to postmeta painting). The postmeta characteristics that are relatively absent are indexicality and mass-media imagery, but Maia Rosa’s intention was never to be exhaustive. Fundamental among Maia Rosa’s other artistic qualities is an esthetic of uncertainty.46 While certainty is comforting, it is often achieved at the expense of vulnerability, and without vulnerability there can be no empathy, and without empathy there can be no intimacy.47 A consistent path of development is just not true to human experience. Much of the tortured nature of Maia Rosa’s trajectory is due to his open temperament, often in the grip of doubt and exposed to dueling internal constituencies. His painful path has been to steer away from false certainties, to avoid becoming an illustrator of ideologies or esthetic programs; the reward has been a “zen-catholic” version of “losing yourself to find yourself.” Uncertainty is a friend of ambiguity, and ambiguity is everywhere in painting that is not painting, so much so that Maia Rosa occasionally has difficulty distinguishing whether his works appear inverted in photographs, since he spent most of his time working on them from behind. This reversible vocation was announced as early as 1973, in an early painting showing the artist’s image inverted on a windowpane (fig. 136, p. 162).

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Maia Rosa’s relatively late blossoming and lack of identification, as a mature artist, with any particular Brazilian movement, trend, or group, has stood in the way of the kind of premature success that has made of many an artistic career the remembrance of things past. Even when times were most difficult, Maia Rosa never compromised on experimentation, even if the results were less than satisfactory. Experience led to greater control over the casting process, but never to greater control over the results, which have always remained a source of wonder and surprise. His praxis is devoted to countering Marcel Proust’s belief that “As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely on Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”48 It is closer to what Rauschenberg once said: “Most of the people that I matured with insisted on failure. I once asked Bill de Kooning how he felt about some of today’s painters who seemed to paint ‘de Koonings’ all the time. He said something that Gertrude Stein said that Picasso had said: ‘But they can’t do the bad ones!’ That’s true. I always feel that if I can’t do something that I don’t like, then I’m losing my touch.”49 In his 1986 essay Painting: The Task of Mourning, YveAlain Bois writes that “the latest group of ‘abstract’ painters [thinks that] we can forget that the end has to be endlessly worked through, and start all over again.”50 Bois concludes that the end of painting will have to be endlessly relived for the remainder of modernism as long as the conditions that generated it are still present. This is, in other words, a state of constant resurrection, and it is in this metaphor that Maia Rosa’s deeply felt Christianity and his artistic practice find common symbolic ground. As previously noted, the inspiration behind the ill-fated Venial of 1994 (fig. 93, p. 126) was the Resurrection of Christ by Piero della Francesca (fig. 137, p. 162), Maia Rosa’s favorite painter. The resurrection, whether engaged literally in works such as Ressurreição (1993) and Lázaro (1997), or generically in the artist’s view of his own recovery from artistic and coronary depressions, is a fitting metaphor for the afterlife of painting in hands that can neither give up nor turn back, but need to endlessly work through.

cut-outs

fig.51, p.82

135 Instrument, 1981 enamel on wood with elastic bands, dimensions unknown private collection

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136 Self-portrait at the window, 1973 oil on canvas, 43 x 47” collection Paulo R. Maia Rosa 137 piero della prancesca Resurrection. Christ steps from the tomb while the guards sleep, c. 1458 mural in fresco and tempera, 88 ? x 78 ?” Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro

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1 The founders adopted the punctuation as part of the name to signify open-endedness. 2 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 20, 2003. 3 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 18, 2003. 4 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 20, 2003. 5 See The Technique of Ronald Davis’ Plastic Paintings, Ben B. Johnson, Head of Conservation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in www.abstract-art.com/RonDavis/b_shows/b6_oklnd/oak_cat/oak35_cat.html. 6 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 20, 2003. 7 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003. 8 Dudi Maia Rosa in emails to the author, September 20 and 22, 2003. 9 “Entre a Mancha e a Figura” (“Between the Mark and the Figure”) was held in 1982 at the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro. 10 Some of the execution dates are uncertain. 11 Anthoposophy “is a kind of study and schooling that leads to concrete experience of the spiritual dimensions of the human being and the world. The word ‘anthroposophy’ means ‘wisdom of the human being,’ or (…) ‘awareness of one’s humanity.’ Knowledge of spirit can only be found by spiritual means. Anthroposophy offers an inner path of schooling to attain such knowledge. It takes its starting point from modern critical consciousness and our contemporary orientation toward technology and science.” See: www.goetheanum.ch/rsteiner_e/anthro.html. 12 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003. 13 The artist is referring to two works by Duchamp that are miniature windows: Fresh Widow of 1920 and The Brawl at Austerlitz of 1921, as well as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), of 1915–23. He also remembers seeing a similar shape in a picture of Francis Picabia’s set for the Ballets Suédois’s production of Relâche (1924) in L’Arte Moderna (see fn. 17). 14 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003. 15 Frederico Morais, “Dudi Maia Rosa, a Criação de Pontes através da Arte,” in O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, April 26, 1984. Quoted in the exhibition catalogue Em busca da essência: elementos de redução na arte brasileira (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1987), p. 42. 16 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 26, 2003. 17 Franco Russoli, ed., L’Arte Moderna (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1967). 18 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003. 19 The doctrine that things develop purposively towards an end (from the Greek telos) determined by the thing under development, as a being might move towards individual self-fulfillment or a species towards its ostensible perfection. This would be in contrast to a mechanistic evolution without purpose. Source: www.ouc.bc.ca/fina/glossary/t_list.html. 20 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 12, 2003. 21 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 27, 2003. Thomas Cohn did not recall the conversation, but says that the stance attributed to him would have been ‘typical.’ 22 Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 1975-86 (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1987), p. 26. 23 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 29, 2003. 24 Dudi Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author, September 29, 2003. 25 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 26, 2003. 26 Each was cast over a ground formed by placing three doors side by side, as can be seen in the trisected surfaces. 27 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 29, 2003.

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28 A burin is an engraver’s steel cutting tool. 29 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author, October 6, 2003. 30 The title is based on O Mandarim (The Mandarin), a fable by Eça de Queiroz in which a man is given a bell; by ringing he would kill a mandarin on the other side of the globe and inherit all his wealth without anyone ever finding out. To the artist, this tale symbolizes the perils of temptation, and is connected to the recurring desire to paint on the surface (Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 3, 2003). 31 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 7, 2003. 32 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 14, 2003. 33 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 13, 2003. 34 Ibid. 35 Dudi Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author, October 12, 2003. 36 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, November 3, 2003. 37 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 14, 2003. 38 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 20, 2003. 39 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 22, 2003. 40 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 13, 2003. 41 Ibid. 42 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 13, 2003. 43 Ibid. 44 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 20, 2003. 45 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 19, 2003. 46 I am grateful to Rodrigo Naves for providing the spark for this formulation. Asked during a talk to compare two important Brazilian printmakers, he said, “the problem with Lívio Abramo [compared to Oswaldo Goeldi] is that he was too certain.” 47 I am grateful to Jerome Wile for this chain of insight. 48 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 49 Robert Rauschenberg, published in Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Random House, 1987. p.91. 50 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model. Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990. p.243.

138 Foreigner, 2003 wax, fiberglass, polyester resin and pigment, 77 ? x 78 x 2â&#x20AC;? collection Galeria Nara Roesler

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139 POA, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? collection Alexandre Martins Fontes

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140 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? private collection

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139 POA, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? collection Alexandre Martins Fontes

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140 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? private collection

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141 Lamar, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? private collection

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142 Donald, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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143 For Renée, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3” collection Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo

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144 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3” private collection

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145 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? private collection

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146 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? collection of the author

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147 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? collection Oswaldo Pepe and Ricardo Braga

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148 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? collection Gilberto Chateaubriand/ mam-rj

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149 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? private collection

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150 Untitled, 2005 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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151 Untitled, 2005 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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152 Untitled, 2005 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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153 Untitled, 2005 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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154 Untitled, 2005 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3â&#x20AC;? courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

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New Work, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Nineties Painting, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Spirit of Our Times, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Brazil 500 Years exhibition, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Mark of the Body, Fold of the Soul, Curitiba, pr, Brazil 22 nd Engraving Show, Curitiba, pr, Brazil iii, Brito Cimino Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil 16 th National Visual Arts Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil Voyagers, Itaú Cultural Institute of São Paulo, sp, Brazil The Fault, Valú Ória Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Multiples, Valú Ória Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil New Curatorships, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Sublime Landscape, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil 1995 1st Biennial of Johannesburg, South Africa Havana — São Paulo, Junge Kunst aus Lateinamerika, Berlin, Germany Monotypes with Garner Tullis, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil City Art Project, São Paulo, sp, Brazil João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz Collection, mar, Ribeirão Preto, sp, Brazil Sender, Porto Alegre, rs, Brazil Identity Trips, Casa das Rosas, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Biennial Artists in Niteroi, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil

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1994 Brazil 20th Century Biennial, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Imperial Palace, Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil xxii International Biennial of São Paulo, sp, Brazil A Panorama of Present Day Brazilian Art, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil 1992 Sanart, Ankara, Turkey Inauguration of André Millan Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil 10 Years of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil What are you doing now, 60s generation? Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Brazil Projects, Los Angeles, usa Mokiti Okada Foundation, Brazil — Japan Brazil Now, Cologne, Germany 1987 A Panorama of Present Day Brazilian Painting, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil xix International Biennial of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Reductionism, xix International Biennial of São Paulo sp, Brazil 1986 The Web of Taste, Biennial Foundation of São Paulo, sp, Brazil First International Exhibition of Ephemeral Sculptures, Fortaleza, ce, Brazil

1983 3x4 Large Formats, João Fortes, Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil Braziliana and Brazilians, Art Museum of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Between the Stain and the Figure, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil Watercolors, Universo Bookstore, São Paulo, sp, Brazil Contemporary Brazilians, São Paulo Gallery, sp, Brazil Drawing as an Instrument, São Paulo State Picture Gallery, sp, Brazil 1979 Two Meters and One Page, São Paulo Artists Cooperative, sp, Brazil 1978 Papers & Company, Arts Palace, São Paulo, sp, Brazil 1976 sesc Rural Center, São Paulo, sp, Brazil 1973 A Panorama of Present Day Brazilian Art, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil Young Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, sp, Brazil 1967 Atrium Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

public collections

bibliography

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland Art Museum of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp Padre Anchieta Foundation Collection, São Paulo, sp Victor Meirelles Museum, Florianópolis, sc Dulce and João Carlos de Fiqueiredo Ferraz Collection, Ribeirão Preto, sp Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, rj João Sattamini Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, rj Itau s.a. Bank Collection, São Paulo, sp sesc sp Collection, São Paulo, sp Takano Institute Collection, São Paulo, sp and Rio de Janeiro, rj São Paulo State Picture Gallery, São Paulo, sp Metropolis Collection of Contemporary Art, São Paulo, sp

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petta, Rosângela. “Um mergulho na superfície da tela”. In. Guia das Artes. Casa Editorial Paulista, v. 2, no 6, pp.12-14, São Paulo: 1987. plaza, Julio. “Entre (a pintura e seus) parênteses”. In. Folha de S. Paulo, Folhetim, no 301, São Paulo: 1982. pontual, Roberto. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. Dicionário das Artes Plásticas. Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro: 1969. rezende, Marcelo. A Origem do Crime, São Paulo, Centro Cultural São Paulo: 2004. romagnolo, Sergio. Fluído, texto para exposição coletiva na Galeria Marília Razuk, São Paulo: 2005. rosa, Dudi Maia, Biografia, Cooperativa dos Artistas Plásticos de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1979. ____. “Sem urgência”. In. Arte em São Paulo, São Paulo: 1985. rosa , Rafael Vogt Maia. Na Matéria o Santo Sepulcro. Instituto Estadual de Artes Visuais, Porto Alegre: 1993. ____. Um Verbo para a Carne. Valú Ória Galeria de Arte, São Paulo: 1997. ____. Endoscopia. Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo: 1998. ____. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. Arte e Artistas Plásticos no Brasil 2000. Metalivros, São Paulo: 2000. ____. A Moldura do Sujeito, Galeria Brito Cimino, São Paulo: 2001. zanini, Walter. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. História Geral da Arte no Brasil. Instituto Moreira Salles/Fundação Djalma Guimarães. São Paulo: 1983. vieira filho, Renato. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. Arte em São Paulo, São Paulo: 1984.

catálogos Pinturas, Catálogo para exposição individual no Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1978. Panorama da Arte Atual Brasileira 1986: Pintura. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo: 1986. 19a Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1987. Em Busca da Essência — Elementos de Redução na Arte Brasileira. Curadoria e texto de Sheila Leirner, Gabriela Suzana Wilder. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1987. Brasil Já: Beispiele Zeitgenossischer Brasilianischer Malerei. Texto de Paulo Herkenhoff, Carlos von Schmidt. Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich, 1988. Bienal Brasil Século 20. Curadoria e organização Nelson Aguilar. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1994. 22a Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1994. Dudi Maia Rosa, Marcos Coelho Benjamim, Adriana Varejão. Curadoria Nelson Aguilar. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1995. Arte/Cidade 3: A Cidade e suas Histórias. Texto Nelson Brissac Peixoto, Lorenzo Mammi. Marca D’Água, São Paulo: 1997. Perfil da Coleção Itaú. Curadoria e Texto Stella Teixeira de Barros. Itaú Cultural, São Paulo: 1998. Mostra do Redescobrimento. Curadoria-geral e organização Nelson Aguilar. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo/Associação Brasil 500 Anos Artes Visuais, São Paulo: 2000. O Espírito da nossa Época — Coleção Dulce e João Carlos Figueiredo Ferraz. Org. Stella Teixeira de Barros. Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo: 2001.

artist’s personal web site www.dudimaiarosa.blogspot.com

published by metalivros rua Alegrete 44 01254-010 São Paulo sp tel +55 11 3672 0355 metalivros@metalivros.com.br http://www.metalivros.com.br galeria brito cimino rua Gomes de Carvalho 842 04547-003 São Paulo sp tel +55 11 3842 0634 britocimino@britocimino.com.br http://www.britocimino.com.br

We thank the museums, private collections, archives, and photographers who authorized the reproduction of works and supported the making of this book. We especially thank Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa for his special cooperation. Where not specified, the reproductions belong to the artist’s or the author’s files.

photo credits Amy Walchli fig. 125 Ana Theophilo figs. 14, 112, 113, 123 Anders Allsten/ Moderna Museet, Stockholm fig. 1 Arnaldo Pappalardo figs. 15-18, 21-25, 28-33, 35-42, 4446, 48, 49, 51-61, 85-87, 119-121 Bob Toledo figs. 101-107; pp. 184, 188, 189 Caio Reisewitz figs. 107-110 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licenced by scala/Art Resource figs. 2, 20 Dorothy Zeidman fig. 2

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, ny figs. 111, 124, 137 Fernando Chaves figs. 117, 118, 150-154 files of the artist figs. 10, 11, 26, 27, 43, 62, 78, 79, 81, 89, 126, 128, 133, 136, 138 Gagosian Gallery, New York fig. 50 Horst Merkel fig. 100 Lorene Emerson fig. 64 Luiz Carlos Felizardo fig. 80 Romulo Fialini figs. 72-76, 123, 131 Scala figs. 13, 127

Eduardo Brandão figs. 9, 67-71, 74, 115, 116, 122

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Washington fig. 5

Eduardo Ortega figs. 88, 90-99, 130, 134

Valentino Fialdino figs. 131, 139-149

International data for Cataloging Publications [cip] [Brazilian Book Chamber, sp, Brazil]

Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of paintings/ [text by Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa]. — São Paulo: Metalivros, 2005 Bilingual edition: portuguese/english Bibliography isbn 85-85371-58-7 1. Fine Arts 2. Fine Art — Brazil 3. Engraving 4. Painting 5. Rosa, Dudi Maia — Critique and interpretation i. Costa, Oswaldo Corrêa da. 05-9037

cdd - 730.981

Indexes for the systemic catalog: 1. Brazilian artists: critical appreciation, 730.981