Brazilian critic Frederico Morais presents the first solo exhibition of Teresinha Soares, whom he considers a talented artist. He comments that her work emanates energy “as if it were possessed by the devil,” conveying aggressive feelings by means of gestures and expressions. In Morais’s view, Soares’s work does not have formal or stylistic unity, though he does perceive the influence of the Rio de Janeiro-based group of realists. The critic praises the progress Soares has made in realist works—reliefs and objects (specifically boxes)—that have their own unique style. Morais comments on the ugliness of the figures in this work, as well as the immediacy of the use of color, which is as crude as it is communicative, and wholly devoid of sensuality, shading, or delicacy in the drawing. Morais asserts that the viewer of this work may well be left yearning for a clear, obvious, and straightforward message, since Soares’s art is after all realist, and her raw material crude reality, that is, urban reality—the reality of modern man and his inability to communicate.

Artist Teresinha Soares was born in Araxá in the state of Minas Gerais. She began her artistic career in Belo Horizonte, the capital of that state, after having studied at the Escola Guignard and the Escola de Belas Artes of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. In the late sixties, she took part in important exhibitions, among them the IV Salão do Distrito Federal (held in Brasilia), the II Bienal Nacional da Bahia (held in Salvador), the Salão das Caixas—organized by the Petite Galerie—and “O artista e a iconografia de massa” (held at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro). In the early seventies, Soares did a series of performances. After having worked as a film critic, Frederico Morais (b. 1930) began publishing texts in defense of the experimental avant-garde in a number of Belo Horizonte-based newspapers. In 1967, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked intensively as a critic, addressing themes implicit in this text, such as the questioning of artistic categories—in this case, painting is undermined by Soares’s “box-oil paintings” and by the very idea of the “object” in the contemporary world. For additional information, see another artist from Minas Gerais, Marília Giannetti Torres, whom Morais writes about in “Revisão do método critico” [doc. no. 1110473]. In it, Morais discusses the specificity of Giannetti Torres’s pictorial work when it is read in relation to Ferreira Gullar’s “Teoria do não objeto” (1960).