In this essay about Brazilian art, the critic Rodrigo Naves refers, first of all, to the formal timidity of the works produced in Brazil since the modernism of the 1920s. When compared with the modern art shown on the international circuit, which achieves its powerful, decisive look by toning down the representative nature of its component parts, Brazilian art is beset by a perceptive slowness that dampens the force of its emergence. Despite its autonomy of colors, forms, and lines, Brazilian modern art insists on delaying its visual definition and suspending its topicality. Naves illustrates that obstinate contention, that difficulty with looking outward, through an analysis of the work of artists such as Tarsila do Amaral, Ismael Nery, Anita Malfatti, and Milton Dacosta. He also mentions artists who have tried to replace the traditional contemplative approach with an openness to life, as in the cases of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark: artists who transformed their work into a purely sensory experience with works that focused on the inner and/or intimate feelings of the viewer. That “difficulty of the form” led to the alternate idea of “a difficult form,” that can be easily identified in works whose intensity, determination, and expansive potential coexist with a certain tendency toward fragmentation, discontinuity, and uncertainty. Also in the works of Iberê Camargo, Oswaldo Goeldi, Eduardo Sued, Sérgio Camargo, and Mira Schendel, the author explores the force field in which those obstacles move between the energy of strong, uninhibited forms and the resistance to carrying those same forms to their utmost limits.   

This is the introduction to the book A forma difícil by Rodrigo Naves (b. 1955), followed by essays on the works of artists who focused on Brazil, such as the French painter Jean Baptiste Debret (1768–1848), the Italian-Brazilian Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), the Lithuanian-born visual artist Lasar Segall (1891–1957), and two genuinely Brazilian artists, Amilcar de Castro (1920–2002) and Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962). In his thesis, Naves posits that the common element in the career of these artists is what he sees as a certain formal fragility and timidity. This was one of the defining features of Brazilian modern and contemporary art, as distinct from the strong structural nature of twentieth-century international art. This has become an obligatory reference in recent art criticism, in which the approach to the art object has become more analytical than historical (which has always been based on periods). In his book, Naves tries to suggest links between the various characteristics of those “difficult forms” in art and the country’s models for social organization, whose accommodations and lack of structural definition define a kind of sociability that is also lacerated.     

The art historian, critic, university professor, and fiction writer Rodrigo Naves was the editor of Folhetim, the supplement of the Folha de São Paulo, and of Novos Estudos magazine. He is currently the director of Espaços, an editorial project about Brazilian art sponsored by the Cosac Naify publishing house.