by Kiki Mazzucchelli
Jonathas de Andrade’s first solo show at Vermelho, Ressaca Tropical [Tropical Hangover] presents five recent works of this young artist from the northeastern city of Maceió who will participate in the next São Paulo Biennial, in September (2010).
Including 5 recent works, the show borrows its title from the photo-installation of the same name, in which Jonathas appropriates a love diary that are illustrated by a set of photographic images from personal archives, public collections, and also new photographs created by the artist. These images are organized and presented in a non-hierarchical manner, in order to create a fictitious visual narrative in which the past and the present are shown simultaneously.
Here the artist continues to develop a type of work that he calls “pretext photography”, in which he appropriates existing texts, sometimes not identified as such, which serve as a pretext for a certain organization of images. In this case, he appropriated a diary kept in the second half of the 1970s, a record of the activities of an author-personage who narrates his adventures (generally of a sexual nature) against the backdrop of the city, at a time when a certain urban provincialism still reigned, as in the buildings that until then were identified by their names. It was also a time of transition, which would culminate in the great construction works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as the Paulo Guerra Bridge and the Recife Shopping Mall, representative of a new lifestyle that would come to predominate in Brazilian metropolises, in which private interests prevailed over public ones.
The text of the diary was edited and combined with photographic images produced at different times and from the collections of the photographer Alcir Lacerda, from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, and from personal archives, as well as recent photographs taken by the artist himself, thus creating a kind of fictitious documentation of the city. This fiction is constituted from a simultaneity of the present and the past that re-enacts various types of documents, both those that circumscribe a private existence (such as the diary or snapshots) and those that record the urban, public environment (Lacerda and Fundaj), evoking an undefined, post-utopian time, where modernist buildings in ruins or under construction, the luxuriant nature that takes over the concrete corroding its precise lines, and the everyday personal situations, sometimes more intimate, predominate. But despite its apparent emphasis on the constructive force of the project of modernizing urban architecture, the city-fiction of Tropical Hangover, the backdrop for the sexual adventures of the anonymous author of the diary, reveals a dissident force as present as the constructive vocation, and which I designate here as “destructive impetus.
One of Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover)’s goals is to discuss the modernist legacy in Latin America and its possibilities in the present through architecture, recognizing in the ruin a post-utopian possibility. This issue reappears in Projeto de abertura de uma casa, como convém (Project for the opening of a house, as befits) (2009), where photographic images of the pillaging and destruction of a modernist house in Recife are shown along with a model of the destroyed house, pointing the ruin as a possible trigger for reconstruction.
Recenseamento moral da cidade do Recife (Moral census of Recife city) (2007) is a photo-survey that gathers documentation of an action by Andrade which is composed of interviews based on a book of manners published in the 80’s, in Recife. The work combines worksheets, maps, forms and context photographs. First time shown, the photo series O Clube (The Club) (2010) presents images of an old yatch club frequented by the elite Maceió City. The building goes into the sea and creates an underground environment that is appealing to marginal activities. The text-titles of each photograph in the series give clues about the relationship between what is official and marginal in contrast with the bucolic images.
The video 4.000 disparos (4.000 gunshots) (2010) completes the show. Here, a roll of Super8 is composed, frame-by-frame, by random men faces on the streets, constituting an atmosphere of urgency and past, memory and present.
by Kiki Mazzucchelli
Jonathas de Andrade’s first solo show at Vermelho, Ressaca Tropical [Tropical Hangover] presents five recent works of this young artist from the northeastern city of Maceió who will participate in the next São Paulo Biennial, in September (2010).
Including 5 recent works, the show borrows its title from the photo-installation of the same name, in which Jonathas appropriates a love diary that are illustrated by a set of photographic images from personal archives, public collections, and also new photographs created by the artist. These images are organized and presented in a non-hierarchical manner, in order to create a fictitious visual narrative in which the past and the present are shown simultaneously.
Here the artist continues to develop a type of work that he calls “pretext photography”, in which he appropriates existing texts, sometimes not identified as such, which serve as a pretext for a certain organization of images. In this case, he appropriated a diary kept in the second half of the 1970s, a record of the activities of an author-personage who narrates his adventures (generally of a sexual nature) against the backdrop of the city, at a time when a certain urban provincialism still reigned, as in the buildings that until then were identified by their names. It was also a time of transition, which would culminate in the great construction works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as the Paulo Guerra Bridge and the Recife Shopping Mall, representative of a new lifestyle that would come to predominate in Brazilian metropolises, in which private interests prevailed over public ones.
The text of the diary was edited and combined with photographic images produced at different times and from the collections of the photographer Alcir Lacerda, from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, and from personal archives, as well as recent photographs taken by the artist himself, thus creating a kind of fictitious documentation of the city. This fiction is constituted from a simultaneity of the present and the past that re-enacts various types of documents, both those that circumscribe a private existence (such as the diary or snapshots) and those that record the urban, public environment (Lacerda and Fundaj), evoking an undefined, post-utopian time, where modernist buildings in ruins or under construction, the luxuriant nature that takes over the concrete corroding its precise lines, and the everyday personal situations, sometimes more intimate, predominate. But despite its apparent emphasis on the constructive force of the project of modernizing urban architecture, the city-fiction of Tropical Hangover, the backdrop for the sexual adventures of the anonymous author of the diary, reveals a dissident force as present as the constructive vocation, and which I designate here as “destructive impetus.
One of Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover)’s goals is to discuss the modernist legacy in Latin America and its possibilities in the present through architecture, recognizing in the ruin a post-utopian possibility. This issue reappears in Projeto de abertura de uma casa, como convém (Project for the opening of a house, as befits) (2009), where photographic images of the pillaging and destruction of a modernist house in Recife are shown along with a model of the destroyed house, pointing the ruin as a possible trigger for reconstruction.
Recenseamento moral da cidade do Recife (Moral census of Recife city) (2007) is a photo-survey that gathers documentation of an action by Andrade which is composed of interviews based on a book of manners published in the 80’s, in Recife. The work combines worksheets, maps, forms and context photographs. First time shown, the photo series O Clube (The Club) (2010) presents images of an old yatch club frequented by the elite Maceió City. The building goes into the sea and creates an underground environment that is appealing to marginal activities. The text-titles of each photograph in the series give clues about the relationship between what is official and marginal in contrast with the bucolic images.
The video 4.000 disparos (4.000 gunshots) (2010) completes the show. Here, a roll of Super8 is composed, frame-by-frame, by random men faces on the streets, constituting an atmosphere of urgency and past, memory and present.
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