On the basis of a reading of Carl Jung, Annateresa Fabris argues that there are two distinct types of artists: introverts and extroverts. She places Brazilian Wesley Duke Lee in the second category, which includes artists that lose themselves in their creative process and take the work beyond the individual level to approach the collective unconscious, humanistic archetypes, and myths. In Fabris’s view, Duke Lee’s work serves to mediate the memory of origins, and it transforms myth into modern reality. It is a metaphor for creation, and therefore for the process by which art is made. Fabris senses in Duke Lee’s work a dialectic between life and death, struggle and harmony, and creation and destruction. In analyzing the constituent parts of myth, Fabris wonders why the artist does not do away with tradition entirely and turn solely to the new. She then asserts that Duke Lee’s work exemplifies the conflict faced by modern man tied to his past.

This text written by art historian and critic Annateresa Fabris in 1978 addresses the print portfolio Minha viagem à Grécia no helicóptero de Leonardo da Vinci [My Trip to Greece in Leonardo da Vinci’s Helicopter] (São Paulo: Editora Praxis, 1978) by São Paulo-born visual artist Wesley Duke Lee (1931–2010). In her analysis, Fabris comprehends Duke Lee’s work in terms of memory, and a highly personal, and even archetypical imagination that stands in direct opposition to Duke Lee’scontroversial and polemic figure that creates only the ordinary. Fabris’s essay was published in the Antología Crítica sobre Wesley Duke Lee released by Cacilda Teixeira da Costa (São Paulo: Galeria Paulo Figueiredo, 1981).

Duke Leespent the fifties studying in the United States, Italy, Austria, and France. During those years, he came into contact with the work of Robert Rauschenberg (1925−2008), as well as other artists loosely associated with New Figuration, who exercised considerable influence on his work. Duke Lee was responsible for the first art happening in Brazil, which took place in 1963. Along with painter and sculptor Bernardo Cid, fashion photographer Otto Stupakoff, singer Maria Cecília, and writers Carlos Felipe Saldanha and Pedro Manuel Gismondi, he formed part of a movement that would be known in Brazil as Realismo Mágico. In 1966, Duke Lee, in conjunction with painter, photographer, and designer Geraldo de Barros (1923−98), Nelson Leirner, and other young artists, founded the controversial São Paulo-based Grupo Rex. Their work involves issues of memory, eroticism, and great imagination.

Annateresa Fabris has taught at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP). Her research centers on artistic avant-gardes, Brazilian modernism, photography, and technological media in contemporary art.