According to Tadeu Chiarelli, contemporary international art has moved away from personal expression and embraced an industrial aesthetic. This is the result of a serial, modular logic that rejects any attempt to stress the physical and chemical properties of matter. In his opinion, Brazilian work relies on a pre-industrial logic and the survival of non-erudite artisanal intelligence and is diametrically opposed to that approach. Chiarelli references Gestalt via images and objects used in popular culture, with some bias toward the ornamental. He discusses works that evolved out of their own modular structure, with scant input from the artist. He mentions experiments with rope, rubber, lead, and glass that seek to test their resistance to time and space. Scratching, breaking, twisting, throwing, and sewing become precision-driven actions that are selected based on their ability to challenge the material used to create the work. Chiarelli sees a paradox between the anonymous and the authorial in some works, and notes the blend of a non-erudite Brazilian visual sense and the subjects addressed by international artists.    

502416988">Tadeu Chiarelli, curator and current director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, has been active as a researcher and curator in the fields of photography and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian art. His work has shown how art and photography are linked to the art world and its circuits, emphasizing an interest in social events. He played a key role in promoting photography as a fundamental medium in Brazilian art in recent decades.

In this essay Chiarelli discusses the quoting and appropriation of images that are then expressed as a work of art. The essay appeared in the catalogue for 15 artistas brasileiros, the exhibition held at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (October to December, 1996). It was also shown at the MAM-RJ (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro) and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Salvador. As the author and curator of the exhibition, Chiarelli aspires to show the uniqueness of Brazilian art based on the appropriation and procedures of popular culture. The list of participants includes José Leonilson, Efrain de Almeida, and Luiz Hermano, members of the art diaspora in northeastern Brazil (specifically, in the state of Ceará). Leonilson (who died in 1993) came with his family who immigrated to São Paulo; Hermano moved in the 1970s; Almeida, the youngest of the bunch, moved to Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s. There is a manual quality that is common to all their work, which is reminiscent of the traditional handcrafts from the state where they were born. The text was republished, entitled “Colocando dobradiças na arte contemporânea” [Putting Hinges on Contemporary Art], and included in Chiarelli’s book Arte Internacional Brasileira (São Paulo: Lemos, 1999), pp. 121–27.

[See the following articles by Tadeu Chiarelli in the ICAA digital archive: “Amanhã hoje: Casa triângulo de 1988 a 1995” (doc. no. 1111344); “Apontamentos para um mapa das artes plásticas em São Paulo durante 1985” (doc. no. 1111351); “Apropriações: o lugar da arte como questão” (doc. no. 1111252); “Armadilhas para Narciso” (doc. no. 1111253); “Considerações sobre o uso de imagens de segunda geração na arte contemporânea” (doc. no. 1110502); “Da arte nacional brasileira para a arte brasileira internacional” (doc. no. 1075144); “Emmanuel Nassar: erudito e popular” (doc. no. 1110457); “Fotografía en Brasil: años 90 = Photography in Brazil in the 1990s” (doc. no. 1110894); “A gravura no espelho” (doc. no. 1111250); “A gravura paulista significa” (doc. no. 1111251); “Jac Leirner” (doc. no. 1111254); “La mirada contaminada: otras fotografias = The Contaminated Gaze: Other Photographies” (doc. no. 1110893); “Realidade e simulacro” (doc. no. 1111255); “Uma realidade... dilacerante: a produção de Nazareth Pacheco = Nazareth Pacheco’s Output: A Lacerating Reality” (doc. no. 1111059); “Sobre a fotografia brasileira atual = On Current Brazilian Photography” (doc. no. 1110895); “Sobre as pinturas de Mônica Nador” (doc. no. 1111256); and “O tridimensional na arte brasileira dos anos 80 e 90: genealogias, superações” (doc. no. 1111352)].