This is Tadeu Chiarelli’s critical text on the paintings created by Mônica Nador, written as the introduction to an exhibition by this Brazilian artist at the Luisa Strina gallery (São Paulo) in 1994. According to Chiarelli, these paintings are the result of two types of discussions: one, on the act of painting, and the other referring to the clashes between the approach (the painting) and its reception (by the art-viewing public). The writer sets up a comparison between the work of Nador introduced here and the approaches of the Geração 80, of which she is a native. While the work of the 1980s generation set a priority on metaphor, Nador, already committed to the values of the following decade, emphasized the presence of the object in real space.

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.

Mônica [Panizza] Nador (b. 1955) is a painter, draftsman and printmaker who trained at the Faculdade de Artes Plásticas of the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), São Paulo, in 1983. Years later, she often attended the courses on lithography and silkscreen given by Regina Silveira (b. 1939) at Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA/USP). In 1983, Nador held her first individual exhibition at MAC-USP. In 1994, she traveled through the United States on a scholarship from the Mid-America Alliance. In Brazil, she was given a scholarship by the Bolsa Vitae de Artes in the field of visual arts with her project Paredes Pinturas (1999)—designs using acetate stencils painted on houses in a working-class neighborhood in São José dos Campos (São Paulo). She turned that same project into the master’s dissertation she submitted to ECA/USP. Since then, she has been working with low-income communities, and, in 2004, she founded the Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), a workshop open to the community in a poor neighborhood in south São Paulo. From that base, she has promoted visual arts-related activities designed for that population.

Professor Walter Zanini comments on the new phase in the work of Mônica Nador, which entails a “fundamental involvement in the decorative element” [see doc. no. 1111277]; there is also a text by Ivo Mesquita, “Sobre as pinturas de Mônica Nador” [doc. no. 1111265].