By Carlos Meneses |
Sao Paulo (EFE).- Brazil hosts since yesterday the exhibition “Vuelta al revés del revés. Spain at the Sao Paulo Biennial”, a journey from Francoism to democracy that reflects on the dialectic between art and power.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC USP) is hosting this exhibition that brings together some thirty works by Spanish artists who left their mark at the Sao Paulo Biennale, the second most important in the world after the Venice Biennale.
Organized by the Niemeyer Center in Avilés (Asturias), the only construction in Spain by the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, where it was exhibited from July to February, the show now returns to its origins, in Sao Paulo.
Not in vain its title is taken from the song “Sampa” that the Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso dedicated to this Brazilian metropolis where everything comes together, mixes, comes, returns and returns.
With that idea, this journey through Spanish contemporary art from the second half of the 20th century was born, which has brought together representations by Rafael Canogar, Antoni Tàpies, Jorge Oteiza, Isabel Pons, Modest Cuixart, José Luis Verdes and Fernando Odriozola, among others.
A lithograph by Pablo Picasso has also been included to commemorate the passage of Guernica in the II Sao Paulo Biennial (1953).
A reading of art, but also politics
Spain has participated in all the Sao Paulo Biennials, with the exception of the first (1951), and the regime of the dictator Francisco Franco (1939-1975) turned the Spanish pavilion into a propaganda instrument, in an attempt to break its international isolation. after the Civil War (1936-1939).
“And the place where Spain could exercise the greatest influence was Latin America. This type of international competition where Spanish art could be presented was an important moment to establish cultural relations and exert influence”, the curator of the exhibition, Genoveva Tusell, told EFE.
Professor of Art History at the National Distance Education University (UNED), Tusell explains that the Franco dictatorship wanted to convey the false idea that Spain “was a modern” “open” country through avant-garde art.
“The important thing was to be successful,” he says.
At that time, the Biennial also welcomed artists born in Spain who, exiled or expatriated by the dictatorship, developed their professional careers abroad and participated in it representing other countries.
“Such was the case of Isabel Pons and Fernando Odriozola, who were in editions of the 60s and 70s, but represented Brazil and won prizes as Brazilians” and being almost unknown in Spain, the general director of the Niemeyer Center in Avilés tells EFE. , Carlos Cuadros.
Complaints against the repression
But there comes a time when the progressive opening of the Franco regime makes political issues slide and even denounces against repression and torture.
Within this framework, the peak of the Spanish presence came in 1971, with the disturbing oil on wood, polyester and fiberglass by Rafael Canogar “Los revolucionarios”.
This work, halfway between a painting and a photograph and which won the Itamaraty Grand Prize for the 11th edition, shows a kind of military that seems to be going to put down a demonstration.
“It is something that has a lot to do with what was happening with the dictatorship in Spain, but also with what was happening in Brazil, where there was also a military dictatorship” that ruled from 1964 to 1985, says Tusell.
This oil painting is accompanied by “Libertad encarcelada” (Incarcerated Freedom) by an overwhelming construction in polyester and fiberglass, also by Canogar, in which four faces, apparently imprisoned, take their hands out of the bars as if asking for help.
Starting in 1975, with the fall of the dictatorship, the Spain that is presented at the Biennial changes radically. Democracy has returned.
The exhibition explores all this evolution from this compendium of works from the collection of the MAC USP, the Reina Sofía Museum of Spain and some public and private providers.
It will be open to the public in Sao Paulo until June 4, the date on which each creation will start the road back home or, as Veloso sang, the road back “backwards”.