A Contemplação do Mundo [The Contemplation of the World] is the fifth installment of Paralela, São Paulo’s version of a Salon des Refusés for artists who were not selected to participate in the 29th São Paulo Biennial. This installment’s title, taken from the writing of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, suggests that visitors are given the opportunity to see the world through the work of the artists, emphasizing the relationship between politics and art.1
The curator of Paralela // 2010 is Paulo Reis, director of Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa in Lisbon and co-director of the contemporary art magazine Dardo. Reis organized the work of eighty-two artists at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios to serve as a thematic extension of the Biennial. However, similar to the Biennial, many of the pieces included in Contemplação do Mundo share little or no discernible relationship to one another. Even though A Contemplação do Mundo is a more manageable exhibition than the Biennial—with roughly half the artist—the rubric used to select artists and work remained a mystery to me. Nonetheless, the exhibition’s inconsistency is offset by the multi-generational survey of mostly local artists with strong ties to Brazil.
While the exhibition as a whole fails to offer insight into the criteria for what makes a work of art political, the works that do directly address political and social issues are some of the most poignant. An installation by Rosana Ricalde, Atrás da Liberdade [Behind Liberty] (2010), is one example. The artist carefully cut the definitions of liberty from a multitude of sources, neatly laid and stacked them on a table, and placed the extracted texts in a frame that hangs in front of the scored books.
Rosana Ricalde. Atrás da liberdade, 2010; installation view, Paralela // 2010, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of Baró Galeria, São Paulo.
While the enjoyment one receives looking at the work of artists like Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Lygia Clark is understandable, their presence in the Biennial is expected, and not missed at Paralela // 2010. Visiting A Contemplação do Mundo provides visitors with a fresh perspective of contemporary art in Brazil, and perhaps the opportunity to see a new generation of the country’s most influential artists.
Charles L. Moffett is a graduate student at California College of the Arts where he is a Curatorial Practice degree candidate.
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NOTES:
1. Maffesoli, Michel. Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style, trans. Susan Emanuel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
