Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This essay by the Brazilian art critic Ronaldo Brito appears in the catalogue for the exhibition Milton Dacosta Anos 50 (1988). Brito describes Milton Dacosta’s Constructivist work, produced in the late 1950s, as a paradoxical hybrid after the [...]

Ronaldo Brito understands Sérgio Camargo’s work as experimental contemporary sculpture, executed in a way that combines elements, although it is always concerned with volume and organic principles. In this 1990 article, Brito discusses the artist [...]

In this text, Ronaldo Brito analyzes Amilcar de Castro’s work in the media of sculpture and drawing. He discusses the connections between de Castro’s production and modern sculpture. Brito asserts that de Castro’s art formulates a rejection of [...]

In this statement, Ronaldo Brito takes the opportunity to clarify that the journal he cofounded, Malasartes, marked a moment in the Brazilian art world where there were different meanings for the various cultural participants. In his opinion, the [...]

In this text, Ronaldo Brito emphasizes the modern themes in the sculpture of José Resende; these go far beyond the mere absence of a pedestal, celebrating “the experience of the contemporary urban space, unfiltered by hierarchies.” Although the [...]

This book on artist Cildo Meireles forms part of the ABC—Arte Brasileira Contemporânea—a collection published by the Fundação Nacional de Artes (Funarte), a governmental organization with headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. The volume contains the [...]

In this essay on Brazilian painter Jorge Guinle, critic Ronaldo Brito ponders the possibility that Postmodernism will come to be seen as a “basic continuity,” or even as a “regression.” In Brito’s view, this is the dilemma underlying the [...]

In his article, Ronaldo Brito contemplates the paintings of Eduardo Sued and Jorge Guinle. In the writer’s opinion, the work of both artists stimulates discussion about the possibilities of painting, without limiting us to Post-Modern eclecticism. [...]

In this essay, the critic Ronaldo Brito reviews the experimental installations created by Cildo Meireles, and discusses the constant deconstruction of expectations he finds in the artist’s work. According to Brito, Cildo’s work “dismantles the [...]

The art critic Ronaldo Brito weighs the interventions proposed in a space by Umberto Costa Barros, observing that the artist’s work sets forth real data as well as the material nature of an art space. He also comments that there is a whole concept [...]

This text by art critic Ronaldo Brito discusses Tunga’s work on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Ar do corpo [Body of Air] held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) in 1975. After arguing that the work of all [...]

In this review, the critic Ronaldo Brito discusses Atensão [Attention, there is tension], the exhibition of works by the visual artist Carlos Zílio. Brito explains that the exhibition space consists of an area in which the works create tensions in [...]

In this article, typewritten in English, entirely in lower-case letters, that includes the writer’s handwritten corrections, the critic Ronaldo Brito discusses Sérgio [de] Camargo’s work in generalities rather than specifics. Brito distinguishes [...]

This article, jointly written by Carlos Zílio, José Rezende, Ronaldo Brito, and Waltércio Caldas Jr., discusses Brazilian art in the mid-1970s and examines its connection to the local market, a relationship that affected both the circulation and [...]

This article seeks to “analyze”—in the true psychoanalytical sense of the word—Brazilian art’s commitments and symptoms during the process of its resistance to contemporary art and to the utter annihilation of the Fine Arts system. Jointly [...]

In this chapter of his book, Ronaldo Brito discusses the work of the painter Iberê Camargoin during the early days of his career in the 1940s. Brito mentions the painter’s involvement with his pictorial material and the expressive savagery of his [...]

In this text, Ronaldo Brito provides a critical analysis of Constructivist tendencies in modern art. He argues that the emergence of Neo-Concretism in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 was a consequence of the crisis of Constructivist ideologies. Brito presents [...]