Mário Schenberg wrote this text on the occasion of 15 anos de pintura, a show of work by José Roberto Aguilar held at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 1976 (the video Where is South America? was presented at that exhibition). In the text, Schenberg associates José Roberto Aguilar’s art with Latin American magic realism, while also establishing the unique nature of production that vacillates between figuration and abstraction.
Painter, poet, and multimedia artist José Roberto Aguilar began his career in the fifties as a member—along with musician Jorge Mautner and writer José Agrippino de Paula—of the Kaos movement. A pioneer of Brazilian “nova figuração,” he took part in the show Opinião 65, making paintings using an air gun. He lived in London and New York in the early sixties, producing videos and participating in the Banda Performática.
Schenberg was one of the first thinkers in Brazil to address the art-technology pair. His critical work from the sixties revolved around establishing ties between the magic realisms of Wesley Duke Lee and José Roberto Aguilar and the various strains of nouvelle figuration flourishing in France at the time.
The author of this text—politician and art critic Mário Schenberg (1914–90)—is one of the greatest theoretical physicists in Brazilian history. Most of his published work consisted of scientific articles on thermodynamics, quantum physics, statistics, astrophysics, and mathematics. He was the president of the Sociedad Brasileña de Física from 1979 to 1981, and the director of the Physics Department at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) from 1953 to 1961. He was twice elected congressman for the state of São Paulo. Due to his ties to the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), his political, academic, and civil rights were abrogated after a military coup in 1964 that ushered in two decades of military dictatorship (1964–85). Schenberg identifies those years with a period of great creativity in Brazil. In 1969, the X São Paulo Biennial was held despite international boycotts due to AI-5 (Acto Institucional no. 5), which suspended civil rights. That same year, Schenberg was dismissed from the university without a pension and even banned from the premises of the USP.