This is a text with a pronounced personal tone that was written for the purpose of erasing the line that divides an object from an interpretative reading of it. Frederico Morais pointed out a set of factors underlying the resurgence of painting at that point in the twentieth century [1980s]. Although many people dismissed such work in advance, he defended these paintings as “antiauthoritarian,” paintings that take a clear position against the hermetic intellectualism of the art that preceded it. In his comments on the exhibition 3x4 Grandes formatos, held at the Centro Empresarial Rio in 1983, Morais—adapting the concepts and thinking of prior decades—defended “painting” as something visceral and sensory.

Frederico [de] Morais (b. 1936) is one of the outstanding personalities among art critics in Brazil. When he began his work as a critic, he was initially tied to the film world in Belo Horizonte with arts related materials in several newspapers in that city. Subsequently, he took a stance in defense of unconventional expressions of art and the experimental stamp of the avant-gardes. Around 1967, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he spent years working as an art critic for the daily newspapers Diário de Notícias and O Globo. He was one of the most active of the “committed” critics in the 1960s and 1970s, supporting various avant-garde movements and exhibitions during that period as well as serving as a curator for some of these shows. The emergence of the Geração 80 led him to rethink certain political issues and theories.

Regardless of the diversity of the participants, the exhibition 3x4 Grandes formatos introduced a discourse that would pave the way for subsequent exhibitions, such as Como vai você, Geração 80? At the time, many writers considered this exhibition to be the historical framework for the movement known as the “return to painting.” This movement was compared to the “retour à l’ordre” that took place in the early twentieth century, which sought to ward off the impact of the historical avant-gardes in Europe. Another writer who wrote about this large-format exhibition was Sheila Leirner, in the essay “Grandes formatos: euforia e paixão” [doc. no. 1111353].

Morais wrote a specific text on a symbolic figure of that generation entitled “Leonilson: a Geração 80 ficou para trás” [doc. no. 1110961]. In that text, he gives the opinion that the “return to [figurative] painting” seen in Leonilson’s work is linked to the Transavantgarde and also shows a certain sense of “Brazilianness.” There are other readings of the work of Leonilson, discussed by Lisette Lagnado in “Entrevista com o artista: a dimensão da fala” [doc. no. 1110767] and in “Leonilson: símbolos coloridos” [doc. no. 1110768], and also in Sônia Salzstein’s article “As palavras e as coisas” [doc. no. 1110769].

The writer of the book Explode Geração! (Rio de Janeiro: Avenir, 1984), Roberto Pontual, published a bulletin on his generation from a literary point of view in “Semana nacional de poesia de vanguarda: comunicado e conclusões” [see doc. no. 1110501].