|
Antonio Dias – The Invented Country
Along a career spanning four decades, Antonio Dias created a referential artistic corpus in Brazilian contemporary art. Combining sensitivity and exactness, intelligence and spirit, Dias has been conceiving, since the 1960s, works that bring to light fundamental art issues. Focusing on experimentation as a means to overcome the crisis of art and of modern-period ideologies, Antonio Dias made his way through diversified idioms, mediums and concepts – a clear evidence that art today is no longer a stable concept. It does not follow any programs and reflects the atomized mosaic of contemporary life.
The idea of a ‘closed-end’ formal organization or of a sole and permanent logical system was replaced by the idea of the simultaneity of systems, where experiments and phenomena operate in a continuous process of contagion, outside the realm of classical ‘order’ or of modern ‘purity’. Today, artists can resort to various expressional means and materials, and explore various fields of action and areas of knowledge. What is at stake is, purely, the production of signification.
The exuberant and violent figurative art of the 60s was followed by the anti-lyrical and formally economical ‘desert’ images of the 70s. In the eighties, the artist attained the synthesis between such polarities by associating restraint to excess, the geometrical to the baroque, the mental to the phenomenic.
Dias has resorted to all sorts of experiments – paintings, sculptures, films, photos, records, installations – but constantly sticking to the firmness of logical and conceptual structuring amidst all diversity. This ability to interweave distinct orders of things and divergent polarities – the intertwining of contradictions – made him an exponential name in Brazil and in the international art scene.
In the late 70s, Dias moved to a small village in Nepal, where he lived for some time among paper craftsmen. The artist managed to expand local production and simultaneously made experiments with the addition of natural elements to the paper pulp: tea leaves, curry powder, clay and iron oxide. The use of this Nepali support was extensively used by the artist. It ended up by becoming a signature feature of the artist, and opened up a new path for the use of handcrafted papers by other artists.
The interesting thing about it is not only the appropriation of primitive and, in a certain way, romantic mediums and techniques, but also the intention of employing a living organic support to harbor extremely precise, economical and mental forms and concepts – traces of pure geometry, quasi-diagrams, inscribed upon the organicity of paper. The imprecise borders of the support are offset by the strict demarcation and the ‘surgical’ tracings of the drawings and perforations.
In the early 70s, Antonio Dias devised works bearing environmental, spectacular and, for the most part, luminous characteristics, pieces where the ‘place’ was directly involved with the very structure of the work, which implicated in further involvement of the viewer into a special phantasmal situation, where he/she felt like being part of the enigmas.
The installations made with neon lights, slides, films and videos were produced at a time when experimentalism was rife in Brazil and in the world at large, a time when artists started using the new mediums as attractive fields for esthetic investigations. But the challenge was far from being limited to experiments with cinematic mediums. There was an awareness of the limits of such languages and, above all, the concern of directing them to the service of the intelligence of the artwork.
An important aspect of the experiments carried out by Antonio Dias is that he is one of the few artists who knew how to penetrate the exclusive world of these mediums, apprehending the specificities of each technique, not with the purpose of achieving a transference or a re-accommodation of his usual repertoire, but in order to create forms that were necessarily and absolutely integrated to those novel mediums. The images are directly connected with the supports being used. They are not merely forms relocated from a painting or a drawing onto film. The world of projection, of light, of transparencies and circuits gives the images the possibility of their revelation.
Ligia Canongia
Previously published in exhibition leaflet Antonio Dias – O País Inventado [AD – The Invented Country], Museu Vale do Rio Doce, Vila Velha, ES, 2002.
Translated by Paulo Andrade Lemos.
Rio de Janeiro, February 2006.
|
