Carlos Zílio endorses the attitude which, in his opinion, should be adopted by artists who wish to express any form of resistance. He protests against the critical reviews issued by those involved in the promotion or exposure of works of art, explaining that the artist should clarify anything beyond the “form” that can then be used to create a strategy to present the works to the general public. 

This article was written by the artist Carlos [Augusto da Silva] Zílio (b. 1944) and circulated together with the press release for his exhibition, which was presented at the Galeria Luiz Buarque de Hollanda & Paulo Bittencourt, in Rio de Janeiro, from August 14 to September 8, 1974. The exhibition included the works Espaço-Vida, O Instante da Libertação, Cerco-Morte, and Para um jovem de Brilhante Futuro, among others. The article was subsequently published in Malasartes, the 1970s Brazilian art magazine that Zílio cofounded. Zílio is one of Brazil’s major artists; he has been working since the mid-1960s and has more recently been devoting his time to teaching and contributing to a number of publications.  

Malasartes, the art magazine that was published in Brazil in the mid-1970s, appeared just three times during the period 1975 to 1976. It was a critical, irreverent journal that featured essays and reviews by critics and artists (most of them from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), and translations of international art articles that were considered relevant at the time. It also republished material that had already appeared in other Brazilian publications, and ran movie and experimental poetry reviews. The magazine’s goal was to contribute to the debate on Brazilian contemporary art from an independent perspective, siding with no particular movement, in order to analyze the function of art as part of Brazilian culture.

For additional information on Zílio, see curator Fernando Cocchiarale’s “Entrevista” [doc. no. 1110517].