The modern era arose in the shadow of the ideals won by the French Revolution. The growth of the liberal democracies and republics around the world, the development of the modern ideologies, the sciences and the arts, the invention of total war, and, most significantly, man as a central character in this scene, were born during the revolution.

In the field of art, many artists nowadays are dedicated to researching about the unfoldings of modernism. There are those who prefer to investigate the 16th-century philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political roots that led to the rise of the modern era and the full establishment and expansion of the liberal ideals in all the spheres of Western culture until today. This investigatory procedure is evident in the exhibition U=RI proposed by the young artists Guilherme Peters and Henrique Cesar.

The exhibition’s title refers to the formula used in physics for the measurement of electrical tension (voltage) between two points, and, in the case of this exhibition, reveals a number of the procedures exercised by the artists in conceiving, elaborating and materializing their works. This takes place in the way that the three artists have chosen to represent the human body.

In the case of the series of self-portraits “Enxertos” [Grafts] “Antenas” [Antennas] and Terra [Earth], by Henrique Cesar, man, his physical needs, curiosities, originality and dominion over the forces of nature is the center of the exhibition, and, therefore, of the world, appearing turbocharged by technical artificialities suggested by antennas, in a mix between man and machine.

In the case of Guilherme Peters, repetition works as a tool to evidence man’s eternal search for overcoming the physical and intellectual limits of the body. In the performance “Estudante” [2012], which Peters will stage during the show, the repetition ad infinitum of a single movement refers, according to the artist himself, to the idea of the eminent failure of the entire process of knowledge. In the performance, the artist repeatedly tries to finish an observational drawing which, however, depends on physical action to suspend books related to the history of art by means of a system of pulleys and cables connected like processes to his body.

In 2010, Guilherme Peters embodied one of the main characters of modern history in the video “Robespierre e a tentativa de retomar a revolução” [Robespierre and the Attempt to Resume the Revolution]. In the installation, the artist weaves a commentary about the origin of the Republican movement, which points to the impossibility of the revolutionary utopia to prosper in a world in which simple and repetitive tasks provoke “vertigo.”

In U=RI, the artist continues this research by presenting a set of works directly related to this theme, such as the installation “Retrato de Robespierre”, in which an image of the French revolutionary is printed by way of a continuous process of oxidation, which will transform the image.

A similar chemical process is used by Peters in the installations “Autodestruição dos direitos humanos” [Self-Destruction of the Human Rights], “Terra Santa” [Holy Land] and “Máquina para evocar o espírito de Joseph Beuys através de sua imagem” [Machine to Evoke the Spirit of Joseph Beuys by Means of His Image]. In the first two works, the process of the oxidation of iron plates is constant and will lead to the complete transformation of the image of the 18th-century “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” and, in the second, of a passage excerpted from the Torah which refers to the Promised Land, or present-day Palestine. For its part, in “Máquina para evocar o espírito de Joseph Beuys através de sua imagem”, which makes reference to the performance created by Peters in 2009, Beuys’s portrait and one of the artist himself were embossed side-by-side on a copper plate (Beuys), and an iron plate (Peters). Submersed in an aquarium, the plates will undergo a process of electrolysis, which will make the portrait of Peters, on the iron plate, incorporate particles of copper given off by the Beuys plate.

The obscurantism that the modern era tried to combat by way of scientific knowledge appears in the series “Catacumbas” [Catacombs] by Henrique Cesar. In the drawings, the artist presents images of underground catacombs located in the cities of São Paulo and Paris, alongside the video “Endoscopia” [Endoscopy], in which an endoscopic camera scrutinizes the interior of a skeleton, as well as the polyptych “Radiografia de Parede” [Wall X-Ray]. In the latter, Cesar presents what lies under the cement coating on walls, revealing his scientific interests concerning that which is beneath the sidewalk, beneath the skin or even beneath the façade of walls.

A similar procedure of scrutiny appears in the video “Tentativa de aspirar o grande labirinto” [Attempt to Aspirate the Great Labyrinth], in which Peters used 3-D editing tools to create a virtual stroll within one of Helio Oiticica’s “Metasquemas”. In the work, Peters also appropriates the text “Brasil Diarréia,” written by Oiticica in 1970, which points to the dilution of the Brazilian constructive elements.

To works such as “Catacumbas”, “Endoscopia” and “Políptico Radiografia de Parede”, Cesar counterposes his “Tratado Anagógico” [Anagogic Treatise]. The 1.8-meter-high drawing, similar to a giant chemical formula, uses technical tools with a very clear and specific role in the field of science to verify mystical and obscurantist meanings.

If on the one hand Cesar chooses the term “treaty” to criticize the countercurrent that insists on questioning scientific knowledge, Peter prefers the format of diagrams, schemes, graphics and circuits, which, in the history of knowledge, helped man to organize knowledge and assured the basis for the future comprehension of his acquisitions, to approach subjective questions. This is what occurs in “Projeto para um grande resistor” [Project for a Large Resistor] and “Projeto para grande carburador” [Project for a Large Carburetor]. In the first, Peters used pages from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book as the backdrop for a large drawing that imitates an electrical circuit, and, in the second, the drawing for the design of a large carburetor is overlaid on notes about the French Revolution.

Although he belongs to the same generation as Cesar, Peters, and Salem, Nicolas Bacal (28) was born, lives and works in Buenos Aires. Arquitetura da solidão [Architecture of Solitude], his first solo show at Vermelho, seems to have been elaborated in perfect tune with the idea of knowledge and failure that pervades U=RI, with which it shares the gallery space.
The series of woodcuts Arquitetura da Solidão, which lends its title to the exhibition, is an intervention on the pages of The Cambridge Star Atlas, composed of comments and annotations in the form of a notebook about the images of the Milky Way. The result of this combination is sculpted on plywood boards and offset printed on paper manually with cyan colored ink. In this case, the grains of the wood and the original size of the plywood board constitute a third interference on the original image. The result is prints of the entire sky visible from Earth, in 180 x 250-cm format, to which the artist adds error, mistake and imprecision.
Cited and recited in various contexts and circumstances, in the field of the visual arts, architecture, astronomy, ethics, politics and the economy, the legacy of modernism continues to represent one of the main themes of current art. The confirmation of its failure is evident, but, as suggested by Bacal, Cesar, Peters and Salem, it is the acceptance of the failure of the modernist ideals that provides the space for the resignification and subversion of the terrain for the future.

The third solo show by Jonathas de Andrade, at Vermelho, Museu do Homem do Nordeste features three of his most recent projects: the installations Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste [Posters for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste] (2013), 40 Nego Bom é 1 real [40 nego bom for 1 real] (2013), and O Levante [The Uprising] (2012–2013). The works are articulated as a collection in parallel to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, located in the city of Recife [PE]. Created in 1979 by Gilberto Freyre, the anthropological museum has a collection of more than 15.000 pieces representative of the region’s ethnic, historical and social makeup. In this series of works, Jonathas de Andrade experiments with new bases and methodologies for the original museum, and presents at Galeria Vermelho the first version of this paramuseum.

To create the installation Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Andrade published ads in the newspapers of Recife in search of workers interested in posing for the poster for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste. The posters of the installation vary according to each encounter, in a construction of identity – of man, of the museum’s image – based on an ambivalent, anthropophagic and eroticizing relation.

An installation that is currently participating in the 12th Biennale of Lyon, France, and which recently garnered Andrade the Prix de la Francophonie [Lyon, France], 40 Nego Bom é 1 real is based on the hawker’s cry used to sell this banana sweet in the markets and streets of the Brazilian Northeast. In this project, Andrade constructed a fictitious factory where 40 characters work in the making of the sweet based on a recipe. In a second phase, the installation uses printed texts to reveal a settling of accounts in which the relations of work are made explicit, taking into consideration the subtleties of the personal relations that ultimately come into play. In the project, Andrade takes a fresh look at the theory-myth of a harmony couched in camaraderie, and approaches the echoes of a post-colonialism and post-slavery that constituted a culture of naturalness with the relations of power and dependence, of naturalness in the face of servility, of exploitation attenuated by apparent politeness, and by veiled racism incorporated as a social dynamic.

The third installation that is part of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, O Levante, is an outgrowth of the 1st Corrida de Carroças no Centro do Recife [Street-Cart Race in Downtown Recife] organized by Jonathas on the streets of Recife, in 2012. As the circulation of rural animals is illegal on the streets of Recife, all the horse-pulled carts in the city become invisible to the law. Only by treating the race as a scene in a film, that is, as fiction, could the event obtain the official authorizations necessary for it to take place in the public space.

For Andrade, the presence of the horses and their owners – normally people who are at the fringe of the city’s (and the country’s] developmentalist logic – generates a contrast in the urban space that resounds as an echo of ruralness, revealing the origins of this region. The video and the photos, records of the action in the streets of Recife, represent documents concerning the laws and their non-application, while silently revealing that the laws were made for the few. Andrade’s O Levante accentuates the contrast between the idea of development sought for by the city and the clandestineness that pervades all the public and private sectors of Brazilian society, allowing it to operate.

Museu do Homem do Nordeste is a project underway by Jonathas de Andrade which presents a new version of the “Museu” each time it is set up, cumulatively incorporating new projects and research developed by the artist.