This article by art critic Agnaldo Farias discusses the first solo exhibition of painter Caetano de Almeida at the Thomas Cohn gallery in Rio de Janeiro in 1989. After acknowledging that de Almeida addresses many of the same themes as Nelson Leirner and Regina Silveira, Farias asserts that the painter’s work has erotic, visceral, and abject facets. Farias points out two components of de Almeida’s production: first, the use of a “self-referential artistic object,” that is, “life expressed in the body-to-body contact between the artist and the elements with which he operates”; second, the displacement of “representation based on iconic material to [effect] metonymic contrast.” This ensues thanks to a plurality of gestures and to the discovery of materiality, both of which lead de Almeida to eschew the flat support and a thematic approach.

Despite the relatively alternative nature of his work, Caetano de Almeida formed part of the Geração 80, widely considered an anti-avant-garde or scantly experimental “return to painting” that emerged in the eighties. De Almeida’s production revolves around quotation, parody, and kitsch, which serve to question the limits between the original and the copy.

Agnaldo Farias is a freelance curator and professor at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAU-USP). His first works of art criticism were published in the eighties, and since then, he has become a crucial figure in that field. In the nineties, he was the curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio); he was the curator of the Brazilian representation at the XXV São Paulo Biennial, and later, he was the general curator of the exhibition Bienal 50 anos held in 2001. His books include The Piano Factory (on the work of painter Daniel Senise), Arte Brasileira Hoje (2002), and the monograph entitled Amelia Toledo: as naturezas do artifício (2004).

According to Aracy Amaral’s historical overview “Espelhos e sombras” [see doc. no. 1111060], research on the metaphorical and symbolic power of the body, in particular the female body, was intense in the eighties. Ricardo Basbaum proposes the application of a more rigorous theory on painting from the eighties in “Pintura dos anos 80: algumas observações críticas” [doc. no. 1110972].