This text was written by the Brazilian art critic and professor Tadeu Chiarelli about the exhibition Lusco Fusco (1993), by the São Paulo artist Caetano de Almeida, at the Luisa Strina gallery in that city. The writer observes that Caetano de Almeida’s painting escapes the classic metaphor of the subject/object relationship vis-à-vis the canvas, in the same way it escapes the contemporary version of the “self turned into object.” He adds that: “neither can it be found in the subject, which has zoomed off to someplace between the real and the virtual, life and art.” These works turned out to be insignificant, due to the banality of the repetition and gestures of the artist himself; ultimately, what these works were investigating was both originality and what is original.

The work of Caetano de Almeida (b. 1964) arose in the 1980s in the context known as the “return to painting,” intrinsic to the group known as the Geração 80, although it followed its own, alternative path. Almeida’s works appropriate the reiterative world of the quotation, parody, kitsch and questioning that fluctuate between the boundaries of the copy and the original. 

Art critic, curator, researcher and professor, Tadeu Chiarelli had a major impact on Brazilian art in the 1980s. He later served both as curator and technical director of the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) of São Paulo in the last decade of the 1900s, into the 2000s. As such, he was responsible for a number of exhibitions, outstanding among which were the 1997 and the 1998 rounds of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira. Subsequently, Chiarelli served as director of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP); after working as art director at the Pinacoteca do Estado [State Art Gallery] of São Paulo for some time, he was named general director there in June 2015.

Other Brazilian art critics and artists contributed to the interpretation of painting’s problematic “retour à l’ordre,” which shook the foundations of the Geração 80. These writers included Jorge Guinle Filho, in his article “Papai era surfista profissional, mamãe fazia mapa astral legal. ‘Geração 80’ ou como matei uma aula de arte num shopping center,” published in Módulo magazine (Rio de Janeiro, July 1984); Roberto Pontual, in Explode Geração (Rio de Janeiro: Avenir, 1984); Marcus de Lontra Costa, in “A festa acabou? A festa continua,” also in Módulo magazine (Rio de Janeiro, May-June 1988); and Ricardo Basbaum, in “Pintura dos anos 80: algumas observações críticas,” published in the journal Gávea (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) [doc. no. 1110972].