Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting

Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of paintingOswaldo Corrêa da Costa

M E T A L I V R O S

São Paulo, 2005

© 2005 Metavídeo spProdução e Comunicação Ltda.all rights reserved

editorial and graphic coordinationRonaldo Graça Couto

textsOswaldo Corrêa da Costa

worksDudi Maia Rosa

art and graphic design directorwarrakloureiro

editorial and graphic managementBianka Tomie Ortega

text revisionAcross the Universe Communications

graphic productionMetalivros

administrative secretaryRoberta Vieira

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summary

introduction, 11the deaths of painting, 15what is postmeta painting?, 39Dudi Maia Rosa, 50annex, 165biographic aspects, 185bibliography, 187

Art and advertising flirt with two verbs: inspire andcommunicate. Does advertising inspire in order tocommunicate? Does art communicate inspira-tion? On these two points rest our intentions.F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi supports Brazilian con-temporary artists because of the tradition attachedto its name, and out of gratitude for how theseartists inspire us with their work.It is with great pride that we are sponsoring thispublication, out of gratitude for the transparencyand color with which Dudi Maia Rosa illumi-nates us when showing his work at our agency’sheadquarters in São Paulo.

to my father, for the love of words, to my mother, for the love of forms, and to my sisters, for the gifts of similarity and difference.

8

In writing about the painting of Dudi Maia Rosa, I amtempted to put the word painting in quotes, but the read-er would soon find that tiresome. Nevertheless, one ofthe characteristics of Maia Rosa’s painting is that it is not,strictly speaking, painting. Regardless of what we call it,I will argue that it is a creative response to the constraintsfaced by an artist with a painterly vocation who is also ofhis time. More specifically, it is an attempt to reconcile acompulsion to paint with an intuition of the limits of tra-ditional painting as a language for dealing with contem-porary problems. “To be modern is to know that which isnot possible anymore.”1

Before discussing the nature of Maia Rosa’s particu-lar response, I will attempt, in chapter 1, to survey someof the “deaths” of painting, particularly what I see as thetwo most recent: the crisis of metapainting — paintingwhose subject is painting itself — in the 1950s, and themore general crisis that lasted approximately from 1968(a turbulent political year in Europe and the UnitedStates) until 1982, when Rudy Fuchs’s Documenta viiput painting back on center stage. Chapter 1 will be illus-trated by quotations (many more colorful than pictures)from artists, art historians, and philosophers, while chap-ters 2 and 3 will be illustrated by images. If postmod-ernism can be said to exist — and this is one of the issueswe will examine in chapter 1 — were any of these deathsa symptom of the transition from modernism to post-modernism? If, instead, postmodernism is a narcissisticillusion, what then compelled these ruptures in the con-tinuity of modernism? Or were these ruptures them-

selves an illusion, the result of cultural wars achievingrhetorical autonomy while all around them artists con-tinued to enjoy the application of substance to surface,sometimes with vital and groundbreaking results?

In the early 1980s, when Maia Rosa’s work achievesits defining contours, painting was beginning to recoverits artistic currency. The marketplace excitement thatgreeted this return of painting was similar to that whichgreeted Pop art in the 1960s. In both cases, the art marketwelcomed the return of representational subject matter,more easily digestible by collectors than the opposingswings of the pendulum represented by gestural abstrac-tion in the 1950s and minimal and conceptual art in the1970s. Some of the new painting, however, contained anawareness that something had changed, that innocence,and to some extent modernist idealism had been lost. Inthe 1950s and 1960s, some of the new painting was aresponse to metapainting, and I will examine some ofthese pioneering responses in chapter 2. For conven-ience, and with tongue partially in cheek, I will call itpostmeta painting. In the 1980’s, in contrast, the return ofpainting was a manifestation of horror vacui, a responseto the displacement of painting by the new media —happenings, installations, performances, photography,video, land art. Much of this new painting was a nostal-gic and uncritical recuperation with little apparent con-sciousness of contemporary issues — loose cannons tak-ing advantage of loose canons. There was a reprise ofmetapainting, and even reinterpretations of earliermovements, such as expressionism. But there was also

introduction

I am only free when my will, basing itself critically and philosophically on that which exists, is able to formulate a basis for new phenomena.kasimir malevich, Non-Objective Art and Suprematism, 1919

1110

ed, even if slightly, from the book. Instead of doing thissmall disservice to all, I prefer to think that these worksremain much more the artist’s than mine.

Carlos Fajardo, José Resende, and Antonio Diasshared their insights about the formative context forBrazilian art in the 1960s and 1970s and the situation ofpainting at the time. Rodrigo Naves, Alberto Tassinari,and Ivo Mesquita were kind enough to hear my outlineand comment on it constructively and helpfully. Rodri-go Naves was kind enough to read the manuscript andprovide generous encouragement, invaluable given howhis conception of Brazilian art, his prose, and his profes-sional independence have long stood as an example forme. Since each of the people I spoke to had a consider-ably different take on the period, the responsibility forany inconsistency in my narrative is entirely theirs (whilethe merit of any coherence I have managed to spin outof this confusion is, of course, entirely mine). My father,Sergio Corrêa da Costa, was the second victim of thePortuguese language manuscript, and offered me thebenefit of his professional ear for language and tempera-mental eye for redundancy. The enthusiasm andencouragement of Luciana Brito and Fabio Ciminomade this book possible. To Lilian Tone’s beneficialinfluence over the years I owe a more rigorous criticalmindset, a slightly improved sense of what not to say, anda regrettably belated preference for nouns over adjec-tives. To my daughter, Olivia Costa, who opened previ-ously unsuspected territories of feeling, I owe more thanI can ever hope to express.

1 Roland Barthes, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model(Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990), p. 243.2 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990, AnAnthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, uk: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.,1997), p. 9.

critically engaged painting, including Maia Rosa’s work,which built on the interrupted achievements of postmetapainting.

It is my hope that the first two chapters will attractreaders who might not otherwise have become aware ofMaia Rosa’s work. Conversely, I hope the placement ofhis work within the context described in those chapterswill provide, to those already familiar with his work, amore complete appreciation of its relevance.

In chapter 3 we will examine how Maia Rosa’s workarose from his immediate context — São Paulo in the1970s — and how it dealt with the diminished possibili-ties for critical and creative painting. This was by nomeans a smooth process. Like tiptoeing in the dark,Maia Rosa’s evolution had its share of hesitations andfalse turns. It was also not intellectually driven; there wasno declaration of intent, manifesto, political agenda, orstated ideology. It was — and remains — a process filledwith experimental disquiet, with a trail of euthanisedwork. It is far closer to the traditional cliché of the artistas sensitive receptor — Ezra Pound’s “artists are anten-nas of the human race” — than to the contemporarycliché of artist as career strategist and academicallytrained master of fine arts. Art historians inevitablycurate art history, and while it is tempting and possible toportray Maia Rosa’s history as a formally coherent evolu-tion, the deviations were a necessary ingredient of thesuccesses, and will be included and discussed as such.The chapter will also look at an interesting aspect ofMaia Rosa’s work, which is how his distinctive material— resin-coated fiberglass — functions as a “signature.”Everything trapped in this “amber” becomes, recogniz-ably, the property of this artist. By eliminating any hypo-thetical need for a signature style or subject matter, theartist is free to loot the histories of both representationaland abstract art without loss of visual identity. In waysquite different from the self-referential aspect of 1950smodernist painting examined in chapter 1, the mediumhere is the message, though never the entire message.

Walter Benjamin once expressed the desire to pro-duce a book that would be composed entirely of quota-tions.2 Such an approach would have the virtue of reduc-

ing the number of value judgments committed by theauthor, although they would still be present, inevitably,in the choice of quotes. So I intend to quote — andextensively — since I believe as a matter of principle thatyou should not care about my opinions, only about theinformation that I have collected as input for your valuejudgments. The fact that some discretion went intoselecting the quotations should not stand in the way ofthem being used as you see fit. In addition to represent-ing a contribution to the death of the critic (a humorousmisunderstanding of Barthes’s much-misunderstood“death of the author”), the extensive use of quotations isalso consistent with my subject, who quotes extensivelyboth in his work and conversation. Jargon is occasional-ly inevitable, particularly when quoting, but I will do mybest to avoid it; I will include a definition whenever thiseffort fails. Duchamp knew the value of being enigmat-ic, a charm of which I hope this book is incapable.

I have great respect for academic conventions, andhave tried to follow them in matters of procedure, but Iam not an academic. This book presents a personal view,and is unconcerned with tenure. In writing it I was ableto count on material gathered during conversations withmany people who gave generously of their time. Theartist himself was a constant inspiration, and I can onlyhope that the timbre of this approach honors our dia-logue of almost twenty years. No writing can do justice toMaia Rosa’s work; for that, a composite of this and manyother approaches will be required. I hope this is the firstof many. The artist’s son, Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, wasinvaluable at every stage of the process and respondedpromptly to every request for information, clarification,or photographs. He wrote to me moving words about hisfather, and I hope someday he can bring himself to pub-lish his privileged observations. I owe much of the ener-gy for this engagement to the fact that the enthusiasm ofboth father and son was unrelated to whether my viewscoincided with theirs. I should probably add a disclaimerat this point: as a longtime collector of Brazilian art, overthe years I have been able to acquire several works byMaia Rosa. I was tempted to exclude them from this dis-cussion for obvious reasons, but this would have detract-

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There can be no question of painting in Suprematism;painting was done for long ago, and the artist himself is aprejudice from the past.1

kasimir malevich, 1920

And they come and talk — to us of painting, they comeand remind us of that lamentable expedient which ispainting.2

andré breton, 1928

I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibit-ed three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it’sall over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane, and there isto be no more representation.3

alexander rodchenko, 1939

Painting is finished; we should give it up.4

barnett newman, final dos anos 1930

I do not understand painters who, whilst declaring them-selves receptive to contemporary problems, still stand infront of a canvas as if it were a surface needing to be filledin with colors and forms, in a more or less personalizedand conventional style.5

piero manzoni, 1960

We are witnessing today the exhaustion and the ossifica-tion of all established vocabularies, of all languages, ofall styles. (…) Easel painting (like every other type ofclassical means of expression in the domain of paintingand sculpture) has had its day. At the moment it lives onin the last remnants, still sometimes sublime, of its longmonopoly.6

pierre restany, 1960

the deaths of painting

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I think there is a long modernist tradition of endgame art— starting with dada and the suprematists (if you like),and a lot of artists have made the last painting ever to bemade. It’s a no-man’s land that a lot of us enjoy movingaround in, and the thing is not to lose your sense ofhumor, because it’s only art.14

sherrie levine, 1986

Warhol (…) had to work through the last phases of thepictorialization begun by Rauschenberg and Johns, andgo to the threshold of painting’s abolition, a consequencewhich would soon emerge, mediated to a considerabledegree by Warhol’s work, in the context of Minimal andConceptual art.15

benjamin buchloh, 1989

Between 1966 and 1968, in New York and elsewhere,Robert Huot, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Jan Dibbets,Mel Ramsden, Lawrence Weiner, and others producedtheir ‘ultimate’ monochrome or acted out a variation onthe blank canvas before they switched to Conceptual art.Their Conceptual works are intelligible and can beappraised only in reference to the abandoned craft andmedium of painting, which, unfortunately for thoseartists, is precisely what they sought to escape, since theypredicated their works on the ‘logic’ of Modernist paint-ing while refusing to let them be aesthetically evaluatedwith respect to painting.16

thierry de duve, 1990

I didn’t think when I said thirty years ago that paintingwas finished that it would be so thoroughly finished. Theachievement of Pollock and the others meant that thecentury’s development of color could continue no fur-ther on a flat surface. Its adventitious capacity to destroynaturalism also could not continue. Perhaps Pollock,Newman, Rothko, and Still were the last painters.17

donald judd, 1993

It is both amusing and pathetic that about once every fiveyears the death of painting is announced, invariably fol-lowed by the news of its resurrection. This doesn’t meanthere isn’t a certain truth hidden in this swinging of thependulum — otherwise the phenomenon would haveceased long ago. Is it not symptomatic that just shortlyafter the invention of photography, Paul Delarocheprophesied the death of painting for the first time? Thiscertainly points toward one of the causes, not of the actu-al death of painting — there is no such thing — butrather of the feeling that painting was under threat. Thisfeeling is as old as modernity, and (…) was expressedperiodically all along the history of modern painting. It isstill with us.18

thierry de duve, 2003

The death of painting has been on order since Manet,and the task of every modern artist is to try to achieve it.That is what modernism as I know it is all about.19

yve-alain bois, 2003

I have no more doubt that the era of the end of the pic-ture has been decidedly inaugurated. For me, the dialec-tics surrounding the problem of painting evolved, togeth-er with the experiences (the works), towards transformingthe painting-picture into something different (for me, the‘non-object’). It is no longer possible to accept develop-ment ‘within the picture,’ the picture has already becomesaturated. Far from being the ‘death of painting,’ this is itssalvation, since actual death would be the continuationof the picture as such, as the ‘support’ for ‘painting.’ (…)The problem of painting is resolved by destroying the pic-ture, or its incorporation in space and time.7

hélio oiticica, 1961

I am completely sure that the plane (rectangle) is in cri-sis — Mondrian, the greatest of them all, did with therectangle what Picasso did to the figure. Exhausted itonce and for all (…). It is a crisis of structure — not for-mal structure, that has always been there, but total struc-ture — the rectangle is no longer adequate as a vehicleof expression. Just hang it on a wall and it automaticallyestablishes a subject/object dialogue (representation) byits very position…8

lygia clark, 1964

I’m merely making the last painting which anyone canmake.9

ad reinhardt, 1965

The trouble with painting is not its inescapable illusion-ism per se. But this inherent illusionism brings with it anon-actual elusiveness or indeterminate allusiveness. Themode has become antique. Specifically, what is antiqueabout it is the divisiveness of experience which marks ona flat surface elicit.10

robert morris, 1966

Formalist critics and artists alike do not question thenature of art, but as I have said elsewhere: ‘Being an artistnow means to question the nature of art.’ If one is ques-tioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioningthe nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculp-ture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it.11

joseph kosuth, 1969

The systematic, single-minded, persistent attempt to ridpainting once and for all of its idealist trappings lendsRyman’s work its special place during the 1960s as, again,‘just the last paintings anyone can make.’ (…) If weremember that it was Stella’s earliest paintings that sig-naled to his colleagues that the end of painting had final-ly come (I am thinking of such deserters of the ranks ofpainters as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, andRobert Morris), it seems fairly clear that Stella’s owncareer is a prolonged agony over the incontestable impli-cations of those works (…).12

douglas crimp, 1981

[After Conceptual Art] Art practice was no longer to bedefined as an artisanal activity, a process of crafting fineobjects in a given medium, it was rather to be seen as aset of operations performed in a field of signifying prac-tices, perhaps centered on a medium but certainly notbounded by it.13

victor burgin, 1986

1716

It must be said that Greenberg’s crusade to entrenchpainting in its area of competence was often misunder-stood as justification for a logical process that led to itsdeath, but that was the last thing Greenberg wanted;Greenberg loved painting, and wanted it to live foreverin a constant but nonseditious state of formal investiga-tion. His coolness towards Reinhardt and Stella, as wellas minimalism, was perplexing to some observers.

Above all things Clement Greenberg is the critic of taste.(…) How else can one account for, given his theories —if they have any logic to them at all, — his disinterest inFrank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and others applicable to hishistorical scheme? Is it because (…) their work doesn’tsuit his taste?23

joseph kosuth

(…) Greenberg’s failure to accommodate so-called Min-imal Art might be seen as a failure of nerve in face of thelogic of his own position.24

charles harrison e paul wood

Why has no one announced the death of sculpture, ordrawing, or printmaking? The need to kill painting —generally the dominant mode of visual art since Giotto— can be understood as the need to kill the father, aninternal psychodrama as old as humanity. But neitherthe need to do so, nor the impression of having done so,mean the deed was ever truly done. Because painting,of course, cannot be killed, anymore than playing thedrums or writing a book can be killed. When Reinhardtclaimed to have made the last painting anyone canmake, he was claiming to have reached the end of a his-torically determined process, characteristic of mod-ernism, in which a medium — in this case painting —ceased to function as a vehicle for expressing worldlycontent and became, instead, only about painting, aself-sufficient object, free of reference to anything out-side itself. After Reinhardt, no formal advance was seenas possible; the formal limit of painting as a language,the flat monochrome, had already been reached.Painters might still have things to “say” about the world,but to do so they would have to take a step back, formal-ly speaking. Since the internal dynamic of the avant-garde would never allow it to step back, it became awidely held view that painters were no longer capable ofbeing avant-garde.

The entire concept of avant-garde is, of course, prob-lematic; to be avant-garde was often considered self-justi-fying, and the question “avant-garde of what marathon orwhat army?” was rarely asked. In fact, one of the claimsmade for postmodernism as a distinct condition was thatit did not believe in an avant-garde. In any case, there is aproblematic tautology20 embedded in many claims madeby participants in cultural wars, and it typically goes likethis: first you develop an ethical rule, for example, “to berelevant, a work of art must innovate,” then you reify21 therule so that its subjective nature is forgotten, then youapply the rule to your value judgments so that you onlyadmire works that innovate. Another example would be“to have integrity, a work of art must be true to its materi-als,” so that only works of art in which materials behave“naturally” have integrity.

The most influential tautology of the post-war peri-od was associated with Clement Greenberg, according towhom painting, in order to maintain its integrity underthe onslaught of popular culture (kitsch), must purgeitself of everything extraneous to the medium of paint-ing, such as narrative, representation, and illusionisticspace. The outcome of this compelling ethical rule wasthat only reference-free painting without illusionisticspace had integrity because integrity required these char-acteristics. It is not surprising that this kind of semantictrap can bite the hands that feed it, leading inexorably toa formal dead end.

The one history of painting progresses from the paintingof a variety of ideas with a variety of subjects and objects,to one idea with a variety of subjects and objects, to onesubject with a variety of objects, to one object with a vari-ety of subjects, then to one object with one subject, toone object with no subject, and to one subject with noobject, then to the idea of no object and no subject andno variety at all.22

ad reinhardt

1918

A second interpretation, especially applicable to the late1960s to early 1980s, is that what died was not paintingitself but its historical preeminence. Though sculpturehas always been a fundamental medium, it is hard to denythat the overwhelming majority of artists consideredprominent were painters, and that the dominant mode ofartistic expression in the last three centuries was oil oncanvas. But beginning in the late 1960s, there was a grow-ing sense that painting as a whole — be it abstract or figu-rative — was an antiquated or outdated mode of expres-sion. The majority of avant-garde manifestations took theform of performance art, body art, land art, happenings,and three-dimensional objects that often used materialsuntainted by associations to fine arts (and claimed to beneither painting nor sculpture). Many of these works wereephemeral, leaving only documentary photographs andvideos as “footprints,” so it was probably no coincidencethat, in a nearly simultaneous development, photographyand video established themselves as legitimate media for“fine” artists, as well as photographers and film makers. Sothis particular death of painting can be seen as the end ofits dominance and the birth of pluralism in artistic media.

A third way to consider the paradox, paraphrasingYve-Alain Bois’s account of Hubert Damisch’s position,26

is to think of painting as a game in which matches cometo an end, but never the game itself. Throughout historymany matches have already been played, and there areseveral taking place right now. Matches can happensimultaneously or in sequence, and each match is playedaccording to its own, historically determined rules. Forexample, in the match called surrealist painting, the man-ifest objective is to record the hidden life of the subcon-scious through its visual manifestations. In the matchcalled formalist painting, the objective is to purify themedium and “entrench it more firmly in its area of com-petence” by gradually excluding everything extraneous,such as narrative, representation, and spatial illusionism.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to presentart-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the onething it is only, separating and defining it more andmore, making it purer and emptier, more absolute andmore exclusive (…).27

ad reinhardt

In the match called formalist painting, the limit situationis a white monochrome28 and not a blank canvas becausethis is the game of painting and a blank canvas bears nopaint. If this distinction seems academic, think of the dif-ference between a bare white chest and a white shirt; theblank canvas belongs to the category of readymade, aplayer in the broader game of art-in-general.

All art matches, including painting matches, are gov-erned by a set of metarules: you must start with a set ofconventions, you must establish credibility through aconvincing underlying discourse (through your persona,your words, or the words of your supporters), and youmust develop and challenge those conventions. Theimportant premise here is that the game of painting cannever end as long as anyone remembers the rules of anyof its matches and continues to play those matches (itonly takes one to play). The impact of ideology on thegame — or any other concept — of painting is, of course,crucial. The rules that govern painting matches and themoves that take place within it, are reflective of, if notdetermined by, cultural context. Consideration of theimpact of ideology is beyond the scope of this project, butI will briefly revisit the topic when examining whetherthere is such a thing as postmodernism.

All art has now become completely a game by whichman distracts himself; and you may say it has alwaysbeen like that, but now it’s entirely a game.29

francis bacon

Despite the damage he inflicted upon illusionistic space,Greenberg deserves better. His reserve was perfectly con-sistent because Reinhardt and Stella were crossing theRubicon to a point of no return, while minimalism wasdoing away with painting altogether. The testing of for-mal limits may be an essential part of modernism, butshould operate like Zeno’s paradox, in which you neverarrive by always travelling ninety-five percent of theremaining distance. But art history doesn’t care for suchniceties, and so far has preferred Reinhardt and Stella topainters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olits-ki, and Larry Poons, defined as exemplary by Greenbergin Modernist Painting (1960).

So, despite all the efforts to kill painting, and all theclaims to have done so, we are faced with the historicalfact that painting has remained alive and, in many cases,well. But it is also a historical fact that certain kinds ofpainting were widely perceived to have died, particularlyin the 1950s, and in the period lasting roughly from 1968to 1982. If so, what was the painting that continued to bemade? A zombie, a clone, a cyborg? Was the paintingthat came roaring back in the 1980s a recycled Lazarus?Or were those deaths contests of power expressed throughlanguage, and painting never even became bedridden?Since painting is still playing in theaters everywhere, weneed to look more closely at some of the ways in whichthese deaths were framed.

Our first interpretation, especially applicable to the1950s, is to understand the death of painting as that of avery specific kind of painting whose mission was to testits formal limits. Some 1950s and 1960s practitioners,such as Reinhardt and Stella, with their black (an appro-priate color for mourning) paintings, did, indeed, paintthemselves into a corner. Those who didn’t — Louis,Noland, Poons, and Olitski — have declined in art-his-torical relevance. The painters with the biggest impact— Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Lichtenstein —(re)turned to figuration, but this was a figuration withoutrepresentation, devoid of illusionistic space, consistentwith formalist painting’s interest in painting as thingrather than language. But abstract painting continued tobe made throughout this time, even of the formallyinvestigative kind. Some of it was brilliant and relevant,even when functioning as an elegiac coda or performinga rear-guard action.

[Robert Ryman] is perhaps the last modernist painter, inthe sense that his work is the last to be able graciously tomaintain its direction by means of modernist discourse,to be able to fortify it if necessary, but above all radicallyto undermine it and exhaust it through excess.25

yve-alain bois

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Like the readymade, none of these developments was trau-matic in real time, but rather sent waves into the futurethat only slowly percolated into the fabric of canvas.

(…) the avant-garde work is never historically effective orfully significant in its initial moments. It cannot bebecause it is traumatic — a hole in the symbolic order ofits time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it,at least not immediately, at least not without structuralchange. (This is the other scene of art that critics and his-torians need to register: not only symbolic disconnec-tions but failures to signify.)33

hal foster

The first wave of monochromes (including those ofMalevich and Rodchenko) pushed the lessons ofCubism and Kandinsky to their reductive limit andopened a “hole in the symbolic order” that, for the mostpart, failed to signify because the art consuming publicwas not yet prepared for abstraction, much less for mono-chromes (particularly when they were being made byRussians intent upon building an ideal society on theashes of capitalism). The climate for abstractionremained hostile during the “return to order” years ofthe late 1920s and 1930s, and it was only after World Warii that it emerged as an accessible esthetic for the taste-making classes of western Europe and America. As aresult, the 1950s brought a second wave of monochromes(from Manzoni, Fontana, Kelly, Klein, Reinhardt, Stella)with more widely accepted fathers to kill: tachism inEurope and abstract expressionism in the United States.These monochromes were seen to have taken abstrac-tion once again to its limit, perhaps to an even furtherlimit because they were largely free of the socialist ideal-ism that marked the first wave.

It is certain that through the problematic of abstraction,American painters [of the abstract expressionist genera-tion], just as already in the 1920s the exponents of supre-matism, neoplasticism, purism, etc., could nourish theillusion that, far from being engaged merely in a singlematch that would take its place in the group of matchesmaking up the game of ‘painting,’ they were returning tothe very foundations of the game, to its immediate, con-stituent données. The American episode would then rep-resent less a new development in the history of abstrac-tion than a new departure, a resumption — but at adeeper level and, theoretically as much as practically,with more powerful means — of the match begun underthe title of abstraction thirty or forty years earlier.34

hubert damisch

To summarize, the recurrent deaths of painting can beinterpreted in at least three different ways: as the tauto-logical death of a specific kind of painting, such as thedeath of metapainting in the 1950s; as the end of paint-ing’s dominance as a medium, a widespread notion start-ing in the late 1960s; or as the end of a specific match, tobe followed by other matches. The first two views arefundamentally historicist — implying a chain of causeand effect over time — while the third is more Moebius-like. Although in hindsight the deaths of painting canbe explained, diminished, or even dismissed as fact, theycannot be ignored as events. Most avant-garde artistsperceived them as true, and to the extent that they tookplace in their minds, and in those of many other partic-ipants in the game of art, they fundamentally alteredthe course of art history. Much subsequent paintingacknowledged and responded to these apparent impass-es; whether or not they were justifiable is academic.

Dudi Maia Rosa’s approach was, certainly, a responseto the challenged state of painting in the 1970s, a decadeduring which the medium seemed at its most bankrupt.Pop painting had already lost its drive, and most criticalattention was being directed at alternative media (andout of print, out of mind). What brought painting to thisimpasse? What cumulative “traumas” pushed it againstthe wall? We have at least five candidates for the role ofexecutioner: the development of photography (Da-guerre30, 1839), of mechanical reproduction (Klic’s pho-

togravure process, 1879), of abstraction (Kandinsky, 1910),of the readymade (Duchamp’s bottle rack, 191431), and ofthe monochrome (Malevich, 1918).

Photography liberated painting from objective rep-resentation of external reality. Mechanical reproduc-tion, by disseminating pictures of paintings, under-mined the need for direct experience. Abstractionoutmoded painting as subjective representation of exter-nal reality. The readymade undermined the need forcraft, fusing Leonardo’s “pittura è cosa mentale” (paint-ing is something mental) with Duchamp’s disdain forretinal art. The monochrome, finally, checkmated eventhe representation of internal reality, leaving self-refer-entiality — Reinhardt’s “art-as-art” — as avant-gardepainting’s last option.

Of all these factors, perhaps the readymade was thelast to ‘register,’ so far ahead of its time was Duchamp’sgesture.

(…) the readymade (…) is a message of which Duchampis merely the messenger, an announcement whose con-tent reads: It is now technically possible and institution-ally legitimate to make art out of anything and every-thing. (…) Conceptual art made it possible to be an artistwithout being a painter, but then only with this proviso:that Conceptual art signals the moment whenDuchamp’s message was received, not when it was sent.32

thierry de duve

2322

In fact, this categorical abyss between the abstract andthe representational is one that many artists, such asAndy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, began to challenge.Even within the abstract lineage there were always fun-damental oppositions. Before World War ii, the principaldivide was that between a rational, functional, geomet-ric, materialistic strain that saw itself as instrumental inthe development of society (exemplified by most mem-bers of the Bauhaus, Soviet Constructivism, ConcreteArt) and an irrational, expressive, informal, spiritualstrain that sought access to psychological and emotionalstates (as in abstract Surrealism, Klee, Kandinsky). Somemanifestations managed to straddle both: Neoplasticism,that “jewel of idealist thought,” aspired to “a universalplastic language, based on vertical/horizontal structures,from which the greatest possible dose of subjectivitywould be banished,” yet remained dependent “on thetraditional plane of esthetics — art conceived not as afield of knowledge inside a political and ideological fieldbut as a search, as a spiritual adventure, or at most as aformulation of universal immanence.”40 Mondrian’ssearch for universal harmony was mystical at root, so he“was only able to formulate its theories of productionupon metaphysical bases, inside the magic circle of artand outside History (…).”41 The important point, howev-er, is that pre-War strains of abstraction were ultimately42

about something external to painting. While the originsof gestural abstraction lay in surrealism, with its roots inthe subconscious, after World War ii western artistsbecame increasingly interested in works that are (thing)rather than say (language), works that are only aboutthemselves, that exist only as part of reality rather than asa representation of it.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.adolph gottlieb e mark rothko, 1947There is no such thing as a good painting about some-thing.ad reinhardt, 194743

Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found itnecessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in hispainting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression orsensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting.Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stel-la’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths ofbrush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.44

carl andré

I’m interested in things that suggest the world ratherthan suggest the personality. I’m interested in thingswhich suggest things which are, rather than in judg-ments. (…) you do one thing and then you do anotherthing (…) What I think this means is, that, say in a paint-ing, the processes involved in the painting are of greatercertainty and of, I believe, greater meaning, than the ref-erential aspects of the painting. I think the processesinvolved in the painting mean as much or more than anyreference value that the painting has.45

jasper johns

The invention of the readymade seems to me to be theinvention of reality, in other words, the radical discoverythat reality in contrast with the view of the world image isthe only important thing. Since then painting no longerrepresents reality but is itself reality (produced by itself).46

gerhard richter

It is only within this “problematic of abstraction” that thedeath of metapainting could ever arise since it is a crisisof formal innovation, and formal innovation was less crit-ical in representational painting. The incorporation ofMarx and Freud gave surrealism a legitimate claim toavant-garde status, but supporters of abstraction saw sur-realist form as formally conservative and outdated.

Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi,even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspi-ration from the medium they work in. (Footnote: I owethis formulation to a remark made by Hans Hoffman, theart teacher, in one of his lectures. From the point of viewof this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reac-tionary tendency which is attempting to restore ‘outside’subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Daliis to represent the processes and concepts of his con-sciousness, not the processes of his medium.)35

clement greenberg

I would cast out all expressionist, dadaist, futurist, andsurrealist art. They don’t fit in with art-as-art at all.36

ad reinhardt

In the field of visual production, there is no doubt thatSurrealism was characterized by the preservation of anti-quated formal schema connected to the perspectivalorder. (…) But it’s impossible to ignore the Surrealistoperation in the cultural field: the questions raised bythe critical mechanisms of Breton and Bataille oftenmake the theorizations of Seuphor and later, Max Bill,seem infantile and reformist.37 (…) Surrealism raiseddecisive issues for art practice, including: the issue ofdesire within production, the relationship between artand politics, the solidarity of the institution of art andbourgeois order, the Freudian unconscious, etc. (…)Dada put in check not just the language of art, or thefunction of art, but above all the statute of art, the estab-lished modes of relation between the work of art and lifein society.38

ronaldo brito

To the defenders of abstraction, insult was added toinjury when contemporary art turned to the spiritualheirs of the figurative strain of modernism — earningthem the label neo-dada — for a way out.

The total capitulation to representation signaled by theadvent of Pop art in 1962 precipitated a crisis of majorproportions. The bastion of abstraction had at last beenbreached.39

diane waldman

2524

Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of theproblem of illusionism and of literal space, space in andaround marks and colors — which is riddance of one ofthe salient and most objectionable relics of Europeanart. The several limits of painting are no longer present.A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be.Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specificthan paint on a flat surface.50

donald judd

(…) during the 1960s, painting’s terminal conditionfinally seemed impossible to ignore. The symptoms wereeverywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all ofwhom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt’s claim thathe was “just making the last paintings anyone couldmake” or allowing their paintings to be contaminatedwith such alien elements as photographic images; inminimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupturewith painting’s unavoidable ties to a centuries-old ideal-ism; in all those other mediums to which artists turnedas, one after another, they abandoned painting. Thedimension that had always resisted even painting’s mostdazzling feats of illusionism — time — now became thedimension in which artists staged their activities, as theyembraced film, video, and performance. And, after wait-ing out the entire era of modernism, photography reap-peared, finally to claim its inheritance.51

douglas crimp

That’s why I (…) painted photos, just so that I wouldhave nothing to do with peinture: it stands in the way ofall expression that is appropriate to our times.52

gerhard richter

When you think that it is in 1951 that Fontana did his firstpierced monochromes, Rauschenberg his seven whitepanels, and Kelly his white reliefs, you come to think thatthere is another crucial episode, here, on an internation-al scale, in the recursive history of the monochrome. Asalways, it was an attempt at finding a way out of a crisis inabstract painting by jumping into the third dimension.53

thierry de duve

(…) in the 1960s [there was a] specific sense that mini-malism consummated one formalist model of mod-ernism, completed and broke with it at once; (…) Juddreads the putatively Greenbergian call for an objectivepainting so literally as to exceed painting altogether inthe creation of objects.54

hal foster

There is a sense in which the reductionism underpin-ning the promulgation of the art object, as well as subse-quent moves to ‘dematerialize’ the object, can all be readas a continuation of, rather than a movement beyond,Modernist essentialism.55

charles harrison e paul wood

Another reason for painting to shy away from externalreference was the overwhelming manner in which pho-tography and mechanical reproduction took over thistask, in a way that privileged marketing over esthetics.The young Clement Greenberg, in “Avant-Garde andKitsch” (1939), defended the retreat towards a higherplane as the only way for the avant-garde to escape con-tamination by kitsch. It is ironic that Greenberg, a manof the left, became the most notable apologist for, ineffect, banishing political content from art. First he sup-ported the abstract expressionists, who were often moreinterested in the sublime than in the material, andwhose formalism was impregnated with metaphysics(when not contaminated by figures, such as de Kooning’swomen). Next, he championed the Color Field school,whose formalism was satisfyingly self-referential. But artthat could only signify the sublime or itself lost much ofits capacity for social critique, an alienation welcomedby those who felt that social engagement soiled the puri-ty of art. After the Second World War, art that celebratedthe ineffable, itself, or consumer culture — abstractexpressionism, formalism, and Pop (despite the latter’squota of irony) — became ideal commodities for exportand internal consumption, while politically engaged artbecame anathema.

After the heroic years of Abstract Expressionism ayounger generation of artists is working in a new Ameri-can regionalism, but this time because of the massmedia, the regionalism is nationwide, and evenexportable to Europe, for we have carefully prepared andreconstructed Europe in our own image since 1945 sothat two kinds of American imagery, Kline, Pollock, deKooning on the one hand, and the Pop artists on theother, are becoming comprehensible abroad.47

henry geldzahler

In case it appears I am overstating the role of UnitedStates capitalism (…), let me emphasize the obvious,that the history of modern art from its beginnings wasnurtured within a number of industrialized societies, notjust America. Looking closer at that history, with its ‘art-for-art’s sake’ ideology, we become conscious of the ever-increasing role played by a neutered formalism — at theexpense of our possibility of content. (…) The traditionof formalism has left me largely incapable of expressingthrough ‘my art’ those very things about which I have thegreatest misgivings — and so incapable of changing any-thing through ‘my art.’ These ideological fetters haveconclusively eradicated every possibility of a social prac-tice in relation to art, even the thought of it — theexpression of modern art has become the rejection ofsociety and of our social beings. Now, obviously the Unit-ed States isn’t to blame for all of this, but it certainlydeserves a lot of credit for bringing it to a remarkable andunprecedented pitch. No longer just producing art for aprivileged middle class, it has burgeoned into a spectac-ularly elitist art, remote even from its own producers’actual lives and problems.48

ian burn (Art & Language)

But by the 1960s, the days of purely formalist art werealready numbered. Cultural selection is similar to natu-ral selection in that the fittest art survives, and fitnessmeans the ability to achieve institutional placing. In thiscontest, formalist painting proved no match against therelatively painting-free movements — Minimal, Process,Povera, Performance, Land, and Conceptual — thatcame to prominence at the time. The jump into objectmaking was the logical outcome of the exhaustion of thepicture plane, an exhaustion that, as we have seen,Greenberg never desired, but that was seen to followfrom his premises.

(…) painting that represents nothing is attracted to thesphere of objects (…).49

ferreira gullar

2726

The all-purpose picture plane underlying (…) post-Mod-ernist painting has made the course of art once againnon-linear and unpredictable. What I have called theflatbed is more than a surface distinction if it is under-stood as a change within painting that changed the rela-tionship between artist and image, image and viewer. Yetthis internal change is no more than a symptom ofchanges which go far beyond questions of picture planes,or of painting as such. It is part of a shakeup which con-taminates all purified categories. The deepening inroadsof art into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur asart defects and departs into strange territories leaving theold stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.60

leo steinberg

Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions oftradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebellingagainst all that is normative. (…) Octavio Paz, a fellowtraveler of modernity, noted already in the middle of the1960s that ‘the avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds andgestures of those of 1917. We are experiencing the end ofthe idea of modern art.’61

jürgen habermas

Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumu-lation, discursivity, hybridization — these diverse strate-gies characterize much of the art of the present and dis-tinguish it from its modernist predecessors. (…) Thisdeconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernistart in general and must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism. Modernist theory pre-supposes that mimesis, the adequation of an image to areferent, can be bracketed or suspended (…). When thepostmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to pro-claim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence;rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency,lack of transcendence.62

craig owens

The avant-garde artist has worn many guises over the firsthundred years of his existence: revolutionary, dandy,anarchist, aesthete, technologist, mystic. He has alsopreached a variety of creeds. One thing only seems tohold fairly constant in the vanguardist discourse and thatis the theme of originality. (…) Now insofar as [Sherrie]Levine’s work explicitly deconstructs the modernist notionof origin, her effort cannot be seen as an extension of mod-ernism. It is, like the discourse of the copy, postmodernist.Which means that it cannot be seen as avant-garde either.(…) Because of the critical attack it launches on the tradi-tion that precedes it, we might want to see the move madein Levine’s work as yet another step in the forward marchof the avant-garde. But this would be mistaken. In decon-structing the sister notions of origin and originality, post-modernism establishes a schism between itself and theconceptual domain of the avant-garde, looking back at itfrom across a gulf that in turn establishes a historicaldivide. The historical period that the avant-garde sharedwith modernism is over. That seems an obvious fact.What makes it more than a journalistic one is a concep-tion of the discourse that has brought it to a close. This isa complex of cultural practices, among them a demythol-ogizing criticism and a truly postmodernist art, both ofthem acting now to void the basic propositions of mod-ernism, to liquidate them by exposing their fictitiouscondition. It is thus from a strange new perspective thatwe look back on the modernist origin and watch it splin-tering into endless replication.63

rosalind krauss

By 1968, a year of great political upheavals, painting ingeneral, even Pop painting, seemed relatively anachronis-tic, and any artist coming of age during that period —such as Maia Rosa — would have had to hold a skull inhis hand and ask “to paint or not to paint?” If he or shechose the former, the choices would be to paint as if noth-ing had happened, or to paint as if something had hap-pened. This “something” is an elusive quantum, like asubatomic particle that cannot be observed but whoseexistence is inferred from its impact on other particles.The prime suspect is the alleged passage from modernismto postmodernism, a notion that seemed fairly wellaccepted in the 1980s, but that now seems increasinglyunder fire. The following quotes give us a flavor of the riseand apparent fall of the concept of postmodernism.

[With Courbet’s] quarrels with the Salon of 1851, (…) Iwould venture to say, something called the avant-gardebegan.56

thierry de duve

(…) vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude devotre art.57

charles baudelaire (to Edouard Manet, 1865)

Manet’s ambitions are fundamentally realistic. He startsout aspiring to the objective transcription of reality, of aworld to which one wholly belongs, such as he finds inthe work of Velasquez and Hals. But where Velasquezand Hals took for granted their relation to the worldsbelonged to and observed and painted, Manet is sharplyconscious that his own relation to reality is far moreproblematic. And to paint his world with the same full-ness of response, the same passion for truth, that he findsin the work of Velasquez and Hals means that he isforced to paint not merely his world but his problematicrelation to it: his own awareness of himself as in and yetnot of the world. In this sense Manet is the first post-Kantian painter: the first painter whose awareness ofhimself raises problems of extreme difficulty that cannotbe ignored: the first painter for whom consciousnessitself is the great subject of his art.58

michael fried

I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost theexacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that beganwith the philosopher Kant (…). The essence of Mod-ernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristicmethods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself —not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmlyin its area of competence.59

clement greenberg

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(…) if minimalism breaks with late-modernist art, by thesame token it prepares the postmodernist art to come.(…) [After minimalism] the object of critical investiga-tion becomes less the essence of a medium than ‘thesocial effect (function) of a work’ and, more importantly,the intent of artistic intervention becomes less to securea transcendental conviction in art than to undertake animmanent testing of its discursive rules and institutionalregulations. Indeed, this last point may provide a provi-sional distinction between formalist, modernist art, andavant-gardist, postmodernist art: to compel convictionversus to cast doubt; to seek the essential versus to revealthe conditional.67

hal foster

(…) the return to the figurative order we are now wit-nessing [is a symptom] of the crisis of modernist dis-course today. (…) Although [Robert Ryman] is claimedby some as a postmodernist, I would say he is more accu-rately the guardian of the tomb of modernist painting, atonce knowing of the end and also knowing the impossi-bility of arriving at it without working it through.68

yve-alain bois

I will focus on three moments thirty years apart withinthe twentieth century: the middle 1930s, which I take tobe the culmination of high modernism; the middle1960s, which mark the full advent of postmodernism;and the middle 1990s.69

hal foster

Inasmuch as Modernism is tied up with specificity, it maybe over [in the 1960s] (…) [Minimal and Conceptual]artists sought to pursue Modernism — Modernist art, notModernist painting — beyond the threshold of the blankcanvas, while seeking to halt Formalism — the necessityof aesthetic judgement — on that very threshold.70

thierry de duve

(…) the subject pronounced dead in the 1960s was a par-ticular one that only pretended to be universal, only pre-sumed to speak for everyone else. (…) In a sense themodern incorporation of (…) otherness allowed for itspostmodern eruption as difference.71

hal foster

Andy Warhol’s work (…) turns centrally around com-modification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup can, which explicitlyforeground the commodity fetishism of a transition to latecapital, ought to be powerful and critical political state-ment. If they are not that, then one would surely want toknow why, and one would want to begin to wonder a lit-tle more seriously about the possibilities of political orcritical art in the postmodern period of late capital.64

fredric jameson

Late modernism stood for order — the obedience tofunction of the International Style, the respect for ‘speci-ficity’ and ‘tradition’ in Greenberg’s aesthetics — every-thing in its proper place, doing its duty, fulfilling its pre-ordained role in patriarchal culture. (…) It seems likelythat ‘conceptualism’ is destined, for the moment at least,to be represented as that ‘movement’ which, by under-mining ‘modernism,’ paved the way for post-modernism.(…) I have been using the expression ‘post-modernism’to refer to art produced after Greenberg’s late-mod-ernism lost its ideological hegemony — the moment ofconceptualism and after. (…) ‘Modernism’ came in withthe social, political, and technological revolutions of theearly twentieth century and is to be characterized by anexistentially uneasy subject speaking of a world of ‘rela-tivity’ and ‘uncertainty’ while uncomfortably aware ofthe conventional nature of language. The ‘post-mod-ernist’ subject must live with the fact that not only are itslanguages ‘arbitrary’ but it is itself an ‘effect of language,’a precipitate of the very symbolic order of which thehumanist subject supposed itself to be master.65

victor burgin

Modern art puts the accent on psychic unlinking, on thepulverizing of the image. From this point of view, itevokes the experience of a sort of pre-narcissism in ourpsychic life. Postmodernism, trying to gather together thepieces of this representation, evokes, on the other hand, amoment of the psychic makeup when, under the influ-ence of the erotic drive or of death anxiety, the subjectattempts to unify the ego. Let’s say that modern art insistsupon the individual as fragmented, wandering, at looseends, as one who cannot find himself in the mirror ofany ideology. It seizes this moment of fragmentation in agesture that does not give it meaning but is, in its veryformal existence, a gesture of fleeting sovereignty and ofmomentary enthusiasm. Postmodernism, on the otherhand, tries to integrate this wandering in an eclecticunity, containing regressive elements to be sure, but con-stituting a step beyond the idea of an avant-garde as itimposes a content and the elaboration of a mediation.66

julia kristeva

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ernism considers it a myth associated with the grandauthorial gesture.— Modern art was radical, revolutionary, shocking, andbegged the question “is this art?” It was utopian and ide-alist in ways that postmodern art rejects.— Modern art is “high” culture, an antidote to kitsch;postmodern art embraces the “low” and effaces the dis-tinction.— Modernism respects the integrity of each medium; inpostmodernism, artists mix media, and use words as art(not literature), and photos as art (not photography).— In the games of modernism there are rules, even ifonly for the purpose of being broken; in the games ofpostmodernism there are no rules, except the rule thatsays “no rules.”— Modern artists have signature styles or iconographies,and are media-specific; postmodern artists are eclectic,free to be both abstract and representational, and mixmedia.— Under modernism, there was a divide betweenabstract and representational art; under postmodernism,abstraction is just another form of representation.— Under modernism, painting was alive and well anddominant; under postmodernism, it is a resurrected entity.— Modernism is patriarchal, exclusive, geographicallypolarized, culturally local, and drawn towards the real;postmodernism is genderless, inclusive, global, multicul-tural, and attracted to the hyperreal.— After World War II modernism became the officialculture, an internal contradiction that made it incapableof its critical historical mission.— Modernism believed in the perfectibility of mankindthrough technology and rationalistic planning, whereasLyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity towardsmetanarratives.”— The modernist esthetic stresses the immanent fea-tures of the work of art, whereas postmodernism sees it asa cultural text to be deconstructed as part of a criticalsubject/object relation.

While some of the above points may be polemical, thelist as a whole makes a fairly compelling case that funda-

mental changes have indeed taken place, although onecould argue that things never stopped changing, evenduring the period of undisputed modernism. But it isarguable, with hindsight, that postmodernism was a mis-leading term for a new phase of modernism, one quitedifferent from the previous phase or phases. Characteris-tics previously considered essential to modernism mayhave been essential only to that phase of modernism. Ofall people, Jean-François Lyotard, whose PostmodernCondition: A Report on Knowledge is one of the funda-mental tracts on postmodernism, appears to lay the mat-ter to rest.

What, then, is the postmodern? (…) It is undoubtedly apart of the modern. (…) A work can become modernonly if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus under-stood is not modernism at its end but in the nascentstate, and this state is constant. (…) A postmodern artistor writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text hewrites, the work he produces are not in principle gov-erned by pre-established rules, and they cannot bejudged according to a determining judgement, by apply-ing familiar categories to the text or to the work. Thoserules and categories are what the work of art is lookingfor. The artist and the writer, then, are working withoutrules in order to formulate the rules of what will havebeen done.76

jean-françois lyotard

(…) Whatever happened to postmodernism? Not longago it seemed a grand notion. For Jean-François Lyotardpostmodernism marked an end to master narratives thatmade modernity appear synonymous with progress (themarch of reason, the accumulation of wealth, the advanceof technology, the emancipation of workers, and so on),while for Fredric Jameson postmodernism prompted arenewed Marxist narrative of different stages of modernculture related to different modes of capitalist produc-tion. Meanwhile, for critics committed to advanced art,it signaled a move to break with an exhausted model ofmodernist art that focused on formal refinements to theneglect of historical determinations and social transfor-mations alike.72

hal foster

[In the 80s] we had worn down one of the great experi-ences of that century, which was modernism. Maybe thelabel ‘postmodern’ is overrated and doesn’t mean muchanymore, but nevertheless modernism was available tobe consumed.73

john armleder

(…) so-called postmodernism: Not a single argument hasever convinced me that such a thing actually exists.74

yve-alain bois

Before we brush off postmodernism as dead — like paint-ing, it may live to fight another day — it may be useful tolist some of the infrastructural and superstructural factorsthat might be symptomatic of the condition character-ized as postmodern.

Infrastructural— There was a shift from a predominance of manufac-turing to a predominance of services.— Much of modernism took place in a dualistic world ofcapitalism and communism; the gradual dissolution ofthe latter leaves commercial media (especially television)unchallenged as the dominant disseminator of values.— The shift from a colonial mindset (the direct exerciseof power) to a post-colonial mindset (the direct exerciseof seduction) is deceptively recent, and underlies multi-culturalism and the rewriting of art history to includepreviously marginal countries as legitimate partici-pants.75

— Computers allowed stock exchanges to grow expo-nentially; the search for new stocks to trade leads togrowing interest in emerging markets, which in turn fos-ters greater institutional and academic interest in theircultures.

Superstructural— Modern art believes in an avant-garde, postmodernart does not; the very notion of the avant-garde presup-poses the idea of progress, a dubious analogy to science.— Originality is a requirement of the avant-garde; thedominant postmodern mode is pastiche.— In modernism, the new was interesting by definition,something the not new could never hope to be; in post-modernism, a work need not be new to be interesting.— Modern art tends to interpret art history in linear, his-toricist terms (see, for example, Alfred Barr’s “torpedo”);postmodernism looks at art history as non-linear andstrategic, closer to a spiral or loop.— Modernism is seen as driven by an internal logic;postmodern art rejects this.— Modernism tends to value self-expression; postmod-

3332

In this fascinatingly depressing view, the distinguishingcharacteristic of today’s relevant painting would be aninterminable and quixotic reworking of the end, reminis-cent of a battery-powered toy banging repeatedly againstthe wall.

Assuming there is no such thing as truth — one ofthe sobering lessons of interpreting every cultural mani-festation as a text — it may be more persuasive to picturewhat used to be called postmodernism as a phase ofmodernism that generated certain responses to changedcircumstances, including the dissolution of imperativesevoked by words such as avant-garde, originality, integri-ty, style, progress, radical, revolutionary, shocking, linear,historicist, patriarchal, immanent, authorial. The onlyrequirement that may not have changed, perhapsbecause it is more about being relevant than about beingmodern, is that the artists be responsive to their time. Butif by relevant I mean the ability to speak to our time, Imay just be committing a tautology of my own, so it’s upto the reader to decide whether such painting is, otherthings equal, more interesting than contemporary paint-ing that speaks to earlier times. In conclusion, although much painting in the currentphase of modernism carried on as if nothing had hap-pened, some painters from the 1950s on began to paint inways that acknowledged, one way or another, that priorapproaches were no longer of their time. Though strik-ingly original, these painters were not so much focusedon that traditional modernist virtue — if so they wouldhave been better off using more contemporary media —but on reflecting the complexity and heterogeneity oftheir time. I believe their originality stems precisely fromthe success with which they do this. Purely as a shortcut,and fully aware of the clumsiness of my choice, I willhenceforth refer to such painting — that is, painting thatdemonstrates awareness, in one way or another, of theexhaustion of the twisted trajectory that led fromCourbet and Manet to Reinhardt and Stella — as post-meta painting. As discussed in the Introduction, the firstwave of postmeta painting, lasting from the mid-1950s tothe late 1960s, was a response to metapainting. DudiMaia Rosa is a pioneer of the second wave, starting in

the early 80s, which built on the first generation’s achieve-ments, but was also responding to painting’s apparentobsolescence under the onslaught of new media. Beforefocusing on Dudi Maia Rosa’s solutions, it may be worth-while to provide a global context for them by looking atthe earlier wave of approaches that, more eloquentlythan any theorizing, show some of the different ways thispostmeta awareness manifests itself.

We are born with the sensibility of a given period of civi-lization. And that counts far more than all we can learnabout a period. The arts have a development whichcomes not only from the individual but also from anaccumulated strength, the civilization which precedesus. One can’t just do anything. A talented artist cannotdo just as he likes. If he used only his talents, he wouldnot exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. Itis imposed on us.80

henri matisse

It is not enough, in order for there to be painting, that thepainter take up his brushes again (…) it is still necessarythat [the painter] succeed in demonstrating to us thatpainting is something we positively cannot do without,that is indispensable to us, and that it would be madness— worse still, a historical error — to let it lie fallow today.81

hubert damisch

In Lyotard’s account, Impressionism was once postmod-ern, and so were Cubism, Suprematism, and every othermovement that challenged pre-established rules. But ifpostmodernism is just a misleading label for the currentstate of modernism, we are still left with the question ofwhat kind of painting reflects it. One of the possibleanswers, associated with Yve-Alain Bois, is that contem-porary modernity is a condition of endlessly reworkingthe end of painting, always flirting but never consum-mating, a situation that will persist as long as the under-lying structures of capitalist society continue to hold.

One of [Ad Reinhardt’s] last statements reads: ‘If I were tosay that I am making the last paintings, I don’t mean thatpainting is dying. You go back to the beginning all thetime anyway.’ (…) Hence (…) his constant invocation ofa ‘tradition’ of the ‘last painting’: ‘I often feel I’m invent-ing a new language, the language of Manet, Monet,Mondrian, Malevich.’77

yve-alain bois

One did not have to wait for the ‘last painting’ of Ad Rein-hardt to be aware that through its historicism (its linearconception of history) and through its essentialism (itsidea that something like the essence of painting existed,veiled somehow, and waiting to be unmasked), the enter-prise of abstract painting could not but understand itsbirth as calling for its end. (…) Mondrian endlessly pos-tulated that his painting was preparing for the end ofpainting — its dissolution in the all-encompassing sphereof life-as-art or environment-as-art — which would occuronce the absolute essence of painting was ‘determined.’78

yve-alain bois

(…) One is struck by the fact that [Mondrian] never feltany compulsion toward the monochrome, which couldeasily have provided, so it seems, the kind of absoluteflatness he was striving for. But as an iconoclast ready-made, the monochrome could not have functioned forhim as a tool to deconstruct painting or more specifical-ly to deconstruct the order of the symbolic in painting(of tradition, of the law, of history). (…) But is the endever to be gained? Duchamp (the imaginary), Rod-chenko (the real), Mondrian (the symbolic), among oth-ers, all believed in the end — they all had the final truth,all spoke apocalyptically. Yet has the end come? To sayno (painting is still alive, just look at the galleries) isundoubtedly an act of denial, for it has never been moreevident that most paintings one sees have abandoned thetask that historically belonged to modern painting (that,precisely, of working through the end of painting) andare simply artifacts created by interchangeable produc-ers. To say yes, however, that the end has come, is to givein to a historicist conception of history as both linear andtotal (i.e., one cannot paint after Duchamp, Rodchenko,Mondrian; their work has rendered paintings unneces-sary, or: one cannot paint anymore in the era of the massmedia, computer games, and the simulacrum). (…) Onecan conclude then that, if the match ‘modernist paint-ing’ is finished, it does not necessarily mean that thegame ‘painting’ is finished: many years to come areahead for this art. But the situation is even more compli-cated: for the match ‘modernist painting’ was the matchof the end of painting; it was both a responses to the feel-ing of the end and a working through of the end. Andthis match was historically determined — by the fact ofindustrialization (photography, the commodity, etc.). Toclaim that the ‘end of painting’ is finished is to claim thatthis historical situation is no longer ours, and who wouldbe naïve enough to make this claim when it appears thatreproducibility and fetishization have permeated allaspects of life: have become our ‘natural’ world?79

yve-alain bois

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“Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966,” in McShine, AndyWarhol, p. 57.48 Ian Burn, “The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation,” 1975, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 909.49 Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do Não-Objeto (Theory of the Non-Object),”1959, reproduced in Malasartes, Rio de Janeiro, Sep/Oct/Nov 1975: 26.50 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” 1965, in Complete Writings: 1975-86(Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1987), p. 121.51 Crimp, “The End of Painting,” in On The Museum’s Ruins, pp. 92-3.52 Gerhard Richter, interview with Benjamin Buchloh, in Roald Nas-gaard, Gerhard Richter, Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988),p. 18.53 de Duve, “Monochrome” in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism,p. 302, fn. 25.54 Foster, The Return of the Real, pp. 35, 44.55 Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 798.56 de Duve, “Monochrome” in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism,p. 298.57 Quoted by Michael Fried, “Three American Painters,” 1965, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 769.58 Ibid., p. 774, fn. 2.59 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in John O’Brian, ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance1957-1969 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 85.60 Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria — Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 91.61 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity — An Incomplete Project,” 1980, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp.1001-2.62 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory ofPostmodernism,” 1980, October 13: 79-80.63 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: a postmodernistrepetition,” October 18, Fall 1981: 66.64 Fredric Jameson, “The Deconstruction of Expression,” 1982, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 1077.65 Victor Burgin, “The Absence of Presence,” 1984, in Harrison andWood, Art in Theory, pp. 1099-1100.66 Julia Kristeva, “Interview with Catherine Francblin,” 1986, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 1085.67 Foster, The Return of the Real, pp. 54, 58.68 Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in Painting as Model, pp. 223, 232.69 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 207.70 de Duve, “Monochrome,” in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism,pp. 264, 286.71 Foster, The Return of the Real, pp. 212, 217.72 Ibid., p. 205.73 “Interview with John Armleder,” Artforum, March 2003: 215.74 “The Mourning After,” Artforum: 268.75 The direct and internationally unsupported exercise of power stilloccurs (witness the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), but arguably has becomethe (outrageous) exception that proves the norm.

1 Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism, 34 Drawings,” (Vitebsk, 1920), in Troels Andersen, ed., Malevich, Essays on Art, vol. 1 (New York:Wittenborn, 1971), 127, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model(Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990), p. 230.2 André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” 1928, in Charles Harrisonand Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, uk: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), p. 444.3 Alexander Rodchenko, from the manuscript “Working withMayakowsky,” (1939), in Magdalena Dabrowsky, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 43.4 Barnett Newman to Adolph Gottlieb, quoted in Thomas B. Hess,Barnett Newman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 27.5 Piero Manzoni, “Free Dimension,” 1960, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 709.6 Pierre Restany, “The New Realists,” 1960, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 711.7 Hélio Oiticica, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, (Rio de Janeiro: EditoraRocco Ltda., 1986) pp. 6–8.8 Lygia Clark, letter to Hélio Oiticica, January 19, 1964, in LucianoFigueiredo, ed., Lygia Clark — Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, 1964-74 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora ufrj, 1996), pp.17-18.9 Bruce Glaser, “An Interview with Ad Reinhardt,” (1965), in BarbaraRose, ed., Art as Art, The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1991), p. 13.10 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 1-3,” 1966, in Harrison and Wood,Art in Theory, p. 819.11 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 1969, in Harrison and Wood,Art in Theory, p. 844.12 Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” in On The Museum’s Ruins(Cambridge: The mit Press, 1993), pp. 94, 99. Originally published in October 16, Spring, 1981.

13 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity(Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986), p. 39.14 Sherrie Levine, “From Criticism to Complicity” interview, 1986, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 1084.15 Benjamin Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966,” in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 56.16 Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” inSerge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris,and Montreal 1945-1964 (Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990), p. 278.17 Donald Judd, “Some aspects of color in general and red and black in particular” (1993), in Dietmar Elger, ed., Donald Judd. Colorist(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000), p. 112.18 “The Mourning After: A Roundtable,” Artforum, March 2003: 211.19 Ibid., p. 267.20 A circular argument that is true by virtue of its logical form alone.21 This word has a specialized function in Marx and later, Lukács, but is here used more generally to mean divorcing something from its functional origins, that is, making something appear to have anindependent existence when it is actually man-made.22 In Rose, ed., Art as Art, p. 55.23 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 1969, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 843.

24 Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 798.25 Yve-Alain Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge:The mit Press, 1990), p. 225.26 See Bois, Painting as Model, p. 241–2, and Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 14.27 In Rose, Art as Art, p. 53.28 Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) were a series of whitemonochromes, but were intended as backdrops for the shadows ofdancers. White Paintings influenced John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952), whichconsists of three silent movements. Neither was intended as a radicalformal statement. The latter was intended as the backdrop against whichlisteners could become aware of sounds that lie beneath their thresholdof awareness. In 1960 Yves Klein presented his Monotone Symphony —a single note sustained for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence–as, again, the backdrop for the creation of an Anthropométriepainting (see chapter 2).29 Francis Bacon, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 1962, in Harrisonand Wood, Art in Theory, p. 629.30 Not all these dates are consensual.31 Duchamp adopted the term readymade in New York in 1915 for hissnow shovel, and then applied it retroactively to his bicycle wheel of 1913.The latter, strictly speaking, is an assemblage of two readymades, whereasthe bottle rack of 1914 is generally accepted as the first ‘pure’ readymade,though the term had not yet been adopted. I am indebted to FrancisNaumann for this clarification.32 “The Mourning After” Artforum: 269.33 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The October Press,1991), p. 29.34 In Bois, Painting as Model, p. 256.35 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939, in John O’Bri-an, ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions andJudgments 1939-1944 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p.9.36 In Rose, Art as Art, p. 16.37 Ronaldo Brito, “Neoconcretismo,” 1976, in Malasartes, Rio deJaneiro, Apr/May/Jun 1976: 13.38 Ibid.: 10.39 Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.,1971), p. 7.40 Ibid., pp. 10-11.41 Ibid., p. 10.42 There are, of course, no pure intentions, only pure interpretations (at best). The great modern masters — Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso —painted the world but were also commenting on the state of painting.And no matter how much formalist painting attempted to restrict itself to matters of painting, it also reflected the world. 43 Ad Reinhardt, “Ten Quotations from the Old New York School,” in Rose, Art as Art, p. 166.44 Carl André, Preface to Stripe Painting, 1959, in Dorothy C. Miller, ed.,Sixteen Americans (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 76.45 Jasper Johns, interview with David Sylvester, 1965, in Harrison andWood, Art in Theory, pp. 721, 724.46 Gerhard Richter, “Notes,” 1990, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 1047.47 Henry Geldzahler, in Peter Selz, ed., “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine (April 1963) — 18ff; quoted in Benjamin Buchloh,

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It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when metapaintingbegan, but Robert Ryman is a good candidate for the lastpainter to build a credible career on such an enterprise.In Yve-Alain Bois’s words, “(…) it is only with RobertRyman that the theoretical demonstration of the histori-cal position of painting as an exceptional realm of man-ual mastery has been carried to its full extent and, as itwere, deconstructed.”2 If Ryman is the “guardian of thetomb of modernist painting,”3 an enterprise that presum-ably was killed off and buried by late Reinhardt and earlyStella, we want to know what comes after the resurrec-tion, but self-consciously, not just chronologically.

Since what I am calling postmeta painting — paint-ing that knowingly comes after metapainting — also hasno precise beginning, it is tempting to locate its originsin Johns and Rauschenberg, whose Duchampian cre-dentials were underlined by the 1950s label neo-dada.Both emerged several years before Ryman4, so there waslittle linearity in the transition from metapainting topostmeta painting.

To some extent, the choice of Johns and Rauschen-berg as starting points is the result of a retrospective dis-tortion brought about by a continuous and subliminalrepositioning of events to privilege the art historical pri-macy of certain American artists. In the 1950s, Europewas relatively uninterested in American artistic develop-ments and only began to absorb American art and valueson a significant scale after Rauschenberg won the Leoned’Oro at the 1964 Venice Biennale. At the risk of commit-ting a gross generalization, I think it is fair to say that

European artists of the time reflected a less pragmaticculture of more ardent ideological debate. They weredirectly interested in political content and less con-cerned with the formal aspects of art-as-art (and withGreenbergian ethics) than their American colleagues. Asa result, the European and Latin American analogues ofpop art — variously known as “new figuration,” “newrealism,” and “new objectivity” — were often explicitlyideological. Part of the rewriting of art history by the“winners” is to play down the importance of such incli-nations while making the debate surrounding medium-specificity appear more pervasive than it perhaps was.

This chapter, therefore, will examine ways in whichsome painters, beginning with Johns and Rauschenberg,manifested a postmeta consciousness through theirchoice of subject matter or through a detached approachto the mechanics of painting that reflected the loss ofmodernist ideals. The anguish surrounding the loss ofthese ideals is captured in Samuel Beckett’s Dialogues, aquintessentially modern work about the existentialdilemmas of modernity:

beckett: I speak of an art turning from [‘the plane of thefeasible’] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary ofpretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little bet-ter, of going a little further along the dreary road.duthuit: And preferring what?beckett: The expression that there is nothing to express,nothing from which to express, no power to express, nodesire to express, together with the obligation to express.

what is postmeta painting?

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.ludwig wittgenstein, On Certainty (471), 19691

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robert rauschenbergThe Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 was an earlywarning of what was in store for art-as-art; it also anticipat-ed — in reverse — the appropriations of the 80s that alsoclaimed Duchampian paternity. But it was Rauschenberg’scombine paintings and transfer paintings that staked thefirst major flag on postmeta soil: the combines paid littleheed to the autonomy of media (though not the self-refer-entiality) defended by Greenberg; the transfer paintings,by virtue of being indexical, reintroduced representationwhile avoiding the problem of illusionism. Monogram,1955-59, even includes a paint-smeared tire, an echo ofAutomobile Tire Print. Rauschenberg famously describedhis work as operating “in the gap between art and life”; ifone reasons that a rendering of a tire is closer to art, anda real tire, appropriated as a readymade, is closer to life,then a tire print occupies a space between them and sug-gests that the gap between art and life is perfectly occu-pied by — and is fertile ground for — indexicality.

The found objects in the combines and the foundimages in the transfer paintings were all readymades atthe service of a collage or assemblage esthetic, and reflect-ed a declining subjectivity. Since all of these pioneeringcharacteristics were still fermenting chaotically, there issomething wildly free-spirited about Rauschenberg in the1950s, particularly in the disheveled but tense coexistenceof the gestural component inherited from the previousgeneration with the new mass media imagery. It is anuneasy but pioneering postmeta junction of the abstractand the representational.

(…) [Bram Van Velde’s] situation is that of him who ishelpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since heis obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless,unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he isobliged to paint.duthuit: Why is he obliged to paint?beckett: I don’t know.duthuit: Why is he helpless to paint?beckett: Because there is nothing to paint and nothingto paint with.5

The objective of this chapter is not to be comprehensiveor examine each artist in depth, but to give a sense ofthe variety of possible answers to the challenge of paint-ing after one of its “deaths.” Other artists could havebeen included, but examples from eight painters — allbut one emerging in the 1950s or 1960s — should beenough to circle and charge the caravan in our effort tounderstand how that elusive postmeta is manifested onpainted surfaces.

As will become apparent, a recurring characteristicamong the artists examined here is a consistent disre-gard for the distinction between the abstract and therepresentational. A second recurring feature among sev-eral of them is indexicality6. The latter concept shouldbe expanded upon because it is important to the cri-tiques of narrative and illusionism. An index — astamped hand or a cast arm — is an actual trace of real-ity and, in the modernist value system, occupies a placeof greater integrity than a representation, such as adrawn hand or a sculpted arm, which depends on illu-sionism, something akin to deception. Indexicality isalso important to the critique of subjectivity, the ideathat there was no more room for the grand authorialgesture of the white male virtuoso, embodied heroical-ly by Picasso, and extended to Cinemascopic scale byPollock. This disregard for manual gifts finds appropri-ate expression in the transfer of found images, bysilkscreen or other methods, as well as in the casting offound objects. At the extreme of this disregard, the purereadymade marks the point where indexicality ceasesand reality begins.

In the history of indexical works, a history in whichcollage and assemblage play fundamental roles, twoRauschenberg works figure prominently: Female Figure(Blueprint) of 19497, in which a sun lamp was trainedon a naked model lying on a sheet of blueprint paper tocreate a body print; and Automobile Tire Print of 19518,in which a car with a tire dipped in paint was drivenover twenty-two feet of paper. This quality of indexical-ity that stems from the use of pre-existing objects orimages allows Rauschenberg’s transfers, Johns’s casts,and Warhol’s silk-screens to avoid the twin charges ofillusionism and narrative that ordinarily attend repre-sentational subject matter. In other words, it is indexi-cality that allows them to be contemporary. As we willsee, Yves Klein’s Anthropométries are also indexical, butwith a twist.

A third feature, found particularly in the poppainters, is the use of mass media imagery to reflect theiconography of their generation. To the abstractionists,the return of figurative subject matter must have seemedoutrageously revisionist, but Johns and Rauschenbergwere channeling the post-war, media-driven consumerculture and, appropriately, adopted serial and industrialapproaches to art making.

In early interviews, Johns and Rauschenberg pro-fessed an admiration for the abstract expressionists andpledged themselves to art-as-art. On reflection, this is lesspuzzling than it might appear because even though theirworks turn away from abstraction, they also avoid the tra-ditional bag of representational tricks by seeking to privi-lege the “thing-ness” of things. In reality, postmeta paint-ing is more a response to metapainting than a reactionagainst it. In addition to sharing modern painting’s reflec-tion on the medium (otherwise its practitioners wouldadopt other media), postmeta painting, by adopting index-icality as a legitimizing practice for figuration without rep-resentation, is in perfect harmony with modernist ethicsand its rejection of narrative and representation. On thisbasis, it also created a new tautology according to whichan index possesses more integrity than a representation.

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1 robert rauschenbergMonogram, 1955-59freestanding combine, 42 x 64 x 64”Moderna Museet, Stockholm

andy warholOne facet of Warhol’s work that seems postmeta is thecomplete erasure of the artist’s hand in the rubber stampand stencil paintings of 1961-2, his first to be completelysilkscreened. The execution of his canvases by assistantsis only an extension of this, the artist’s touch havingalready been rendered irrelevant by the silkscreenprocess.10 The Oxidation paintings of 1978, made by uri-nating on canvas covered with monochrome metallicpaint, were a step back in that they again appeared toinvolve the artist’s hand.

Warhol often expressed a discomfort with painting,going so far as to give it up entirely in 1966, but notbefore doing so much to prolong the longevity of themedium, an ambiguity typical of his life, image, andwork. Apart from accepting portrait commissions, hemaintained his decision for nearly a decade. “Warhol’sart until 1966 (…) oscillates constantly between anextreme challenge to the stature and credibility of paint-ing and a continued deployment of strictly pictorialmeans operating within the narrowly defined frameworkof pictorial conventions.”11

Warhol also contributed to eroding the dividebetween the abstract and the representational, treatingthem as equivalent and subjecting them to identicalprocedures. His use, individually or serially, of thesilkscreened photograph as the iconic subject pushesindexical practice and the critique of the authorial ges-ture even further than Rauschenberg does.

jasper johnsWhat might be called postmeta in Johns’s early work is theuse of readymade subject matter, drained of its linguisticfunction as message or narrative, purely as a pretext forpainting, as a neutral vehicle for indulging its culinaryaspects. Johns’s use of targets, flags, and alphabets shows adiscomfort with subjective iconograph, a preference forobjects over subjects. As with Rauschenberg, this express-es the new zeitgeist, and plays down the authorial gesturein favor of a cool, detached approach. This new spirit isalso manifest in Johns’s use of direct casting, collage, sten-cils, and “actual size” mark making, indexical practicesthat bring the outside world back into painting withoutreverting to narrative and illusionism. It is pure figurationwithout representation.

yves kleinKlein created his first Anthropométrie in 1960 by smear-ing a naked model with International Klein Blue9 paintand directing her movements over a blank canvas spreadout on the floor. What might be seen as postmeta is theuse of a body as brush to create an abstract painting witha representational accent due to the nature of the brush.Just as every brushstroke is indexical of a brush, every“bodystroke” is indexical of a body, and only repeatedsmearing can obscure this fact. In the abovementionedRauschenberg collaborations, the indexical nature was leftbasically unaltered; Klein’s Anthropométries use the bodyas an active brush. As bodystrokes accumulate, the Anthro-pométries veer closer and closer to gestural abstraction, amovement whose symbol is, of course, the brushstroke.Part of the postmeta interest of the more active Anthro-pométries lies in how they test these boundaries, onegenus of stroke flowing into another. The Anthropomé-tries where the model lay motionless on the canvas aremore strictly indexical. Closer to Rauschenberg andJohns, they carry less of this indexical ambiguity betweenrepresentation and abstraction.

Another postmeta characteristic of Klein, his interestin removing the artist’s hand, was manifested in themonochromes, in which rollers and sponges were usedto hide his mark. In 1959 Klein witnessed and was fasci-nated by a performance of Jean Tinguely’s “Meta-matic17”, a drawing machine. Without going so far as tobecome one himself, an aspiration that Warhol andLichtenstein were soon to manifest, Klein neverthelessmanaged to remove himself from direct contact with thepaint. The model’s body was like an automaton, subjectto the artist’s instructions, without a will of its own, lyingin the gap between machine and life.

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2 jasper johnsTarget with four faces, 1955encaustic on newspaper and collage on canvas with objects, surmounted by four tinted plaster faces in wood boxwith hinged front, 29 ? x 28 x 3 ?”collection Jasper Johns/The Museumof Modern Art, New Yorkgift of mr and mrs Robert C. Scull

3 yves kleinAnthropométrie (ant 130), 1960dry pigment in synthetic resin on paper on board, 76 3/8 x 50”Museum Ludwig, Cologne

4 andy warholMint Marilyn, 1962silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 20 x 16”collection Jasper Johns

malcolm morleyMorley became known in the 1960s as one of the initia-tors of the photorealist movement, but accurate depic-tion of external reality was the last thing on his mind. Hisparticular expression of the postmeta will-to-paint con-sisted of choosing a source as an excuse for painting andreproducing it without the awareness of reproducing it, apeculiar spin on the representation of representations.

Morley’s procedure has been well described bymany commentators:

“[Morley’s] method, then as now, has been to super-impose a grid on the photographic source, and paint onesquare at a time, with others masked off. Since the ‘60she has used a magnifying glass in painting the smallestgrids. Frequently the canvas will be turned upside downor on its side, to interrupt the natural rhythm of thebrushstrokes and break the figurative reference.”12

“[Morley] started from photographs he divided intosmall, square units that, after being enlarged, werepainstakingly copied on canvas. Each square is painted asif it is a small, abstract painting. Rather than showing offhis technical ability, Morley was concerned with record-ing perception, with painting what he saw. Sometimes heeven turned the model and painting upside down in aneffort to avoid conventional results and to disregard thetraditional hierarchy between figure and background.”13

“[Morley] specializes in producing hand-paintedenlargements of photos or prints by means of a system ofgrids. He subdivides his model into a large number ofpenciled squares. This grid, very much enlarged, is usedto subdivide the unpainted canvas as a first step in thetransposition. His next step consists in cutting one strip ofgrids from the model, having, as often as not, inverted it orturned it sideways so as not to be distracted by the subject.With the aid of a magnifying glass, he reproduces by handthe model square by square in Liquitex colors. In so doinghe substitutes the print’s crude color combinationsobtained by super-impositions of four-color plates by thejuxtaposition of colors on the canvas aimed at producingretinal commingling. Since Morley ‘translates’ the printsquare by square, the objective relations within the pic-ture that he ignored while painting remain unchanged.”14

It is ironic that to illustrate his work here we need touse “crude color combinations” to reproduce a chromat-ically much denser work that was originally made from“crude color combinations.”

“By filling in the grid, square by square, [Morley]ensure[s] equality of value for all areas of the canvas.”15

This equality of value would not be a postmeta quality perse, since it was implicit in “all over” painting, but in thiscase it is part of the postmeta impulse to downplay autho-rial subjectivity. With Morley’s approach, the subjectbecomes irrelevant during the act of painting, and all thatmatters is the application of substance to surface. Whilethe “uninformed” viewer will see the resulting image as arepresented object, whoever wants to approach the artist’sintent will need to perform the requisite mental distanc-ing. The subtle and circular point here, made in the mostvirtuoso and labor-intensive way, is that “It is much moredifficult to make an abstract painting that is real than anabstract painting that is abstract.”16

roy lichtensteinSeveral characteristics of Lichtenstein’s work make it acandidate for postmeta status:

He represents representations, a canny way of rein-troducing representation while retaining the flatness ofthe picture plane.

He expresses a wish to simulate the mechanical per-fection of the mass media.

His palette of primary colors replaces the chromaticsubjectivity of abstract expressionism with the imperson-ality of advertising.

His work exhibits an uncomfortable incongruitybetween style and subject matter.

Lichtenstein’s paintings of brushstrokes provide asatirical twist to the notion of indexicality. While everybrushstroke is indexical of a brush, a benday dot repre-sentation of a brushstroke, even one made with a brush,loses this indexicality. It would, in fact, be just an old-fashioned rendering were it not full of the multipleironies generated by the brushstroke’s status as the iconof expressionism and his cold, detached approach tosuch a hot, emotional act. Lichtenstein’s signature stylealso allowed him to make any subject his own. This kindof easy recognition allows an artist to loot the art histori-cal archives, in Lichtenstein’s case for Monet, Cézanne,Picasso, and Mondrian. By facilitating free transit betweenabstraction and representation, it also helps to effect theirequivalence, a task most visibly performed by Warholand Richter, but also by Malcolm Morley.

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5 roy lichtensteinYellow brushstroke i, 1965oil on canvas, 68 1/8 x 55 7/8”Kunsthaus Zürich

6 malcolm morleys.s. Amsterdam in front of Rotterdam, 1966liquitex on canvas, 62 x 84”collection Norman and Irma Bramancourtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

gerhard richterMost people, when shown a picture of a pipe and askedwhat they see, would answer “a pipe” rather than “a pic-ture of a pipe,” a point made by Magritte’s well-knownpainting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Richter’s decision in the1960s to paint photographs so that he would have “noth-ing to do with peinture”20 put him on a related path: apainting of a photograph is, by definition, representation-al because it depicts an object, but if it is a photograph ofan abstract painting, the result will appear to be abstract.In one sense it would be even though in another it wouldnot. As a body of work, Richter’s paintings explore thisambiguity, proposing, among other things, the equiva-lence between paintings of photos of representationalsubjects and paintings of photos of abstract subjects.

Searching for a new direction, in 1976 Richterbegan to make what he called “sketches” of abstractpaintings. “At first Richter did not quite dare considerthese sketches regular paintings. They were too purelysubjective, so that to turn them into paintings requireddistancing them by taking photographs from them, usu-ally details, as models from which to paint. The paint-ings that resulted, the ‘Soft’ or ‘Smooth’ Abstract Paint-ings (…) are really immaculately crafted photographicpaintings (…).”21 The work below belongs to this series,and its postmeta character is the abstract appearance of arepresentational rendition of an abstract subject.

The later “free” abstract paintings were, as the qual-ifier suggests, no longer based on photographs, but nev-ertheless retained “the modulated, illusionistic, photo-graphically based space of the Smooth Abstracts asgrounds (…).”22 Though perhaps not quite as postmeta astheir predecessors, the “free” versions appear sponta-neously expressive from a distance, yet methodically arti-ficial up close, akin to how a Lichtenstein brushstrokepainting might appear if the benday dots were so finethat you could only detect them close to the canvas.

Ambiguity as method speaks honestly to the humancondition: “(…) always present is the essential paradoxthat out of detached and mechanical procedures, whatRichter calls ‘Utopia, soul, the future, hope’ could sneakinto the work, because of his belief that what nature lets

antônio diasDias’s first works, dating from 1962-63, reveal his aware-ness of the problematic state of painting. Dias avoidedcanvas entirely and inscribed forms and symbols fromBrazilian native culture on rough surfaces he made bycovering duratex17 with plaster. “With the coup d’état of1964 [in Brazil], the political components of culturalmanifestations came to the fore, and specifically formalresearch became secondary.”18 Dias’s subsequent andcelebrated “visceral” phase, that lasted from 1964 to 1967,the early years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, isfull of suggestive skulls, bones, body parts, mushroomclouds, and gas masks, but Dias maintained his dis-tance from the traditional picture plane by attaching allmanner of objects and stuffed appendages to wood andduratex supports. After moving to Europe in 1967, how-ever, something happened that gave Dias license to usethe traditional flat canvas. That something was a transi-tion to a new kind of conceptual subject matter thatbypassed the narrative problem in painting. In Paris andMilan, Dias came into greater contact with theory-basedapproaches, and this deeper understanding of the ideo-logical underpinnings of culture and the art circuit madehim switch to a pictorial critique of systems of represen-tation. As the problems changed, he changed, a transi-tion that recalls John Maynard Keynes’s reply to a heck-ler’s complaint that he had changed his position oversomething: “When the facts change, I change my mind.What do you do, sir?”

Curiously, this postmeta solution was born from anearlier attempt by Dias to overcome the narrative prob-lem. Around 1967-68, Dias would “paint his canvasesblack, then sprinkle white paint on them as an experi-ment in seeking, through painting, a critique through the‘representation of non-representation.’ He would thenshow these canvases to various people, in vain becausethey always saw ‘little stars.’”19 The artist felt he had nochoice but to give the people what they wanted.

As with many of the other examples in this chapter,the question “is this kind of art abstract or representation-al?” is difficult to answer, and begs the postmeta questionof whether the distinction is relevant.

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7 antônio diasAnywhere is my land, 1968acrylic on canvas, 51 ? x 76 ?”private collection

8 gerhard richterAbstract painting, 1977oil on canvas, 88 ? x 78 ?”Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New YorkGeorge B. and Jenny R. Matthews,Albert H. Tracy, and Edmund Hayes Funds, 1980

1 Quoted by Donald Judd, in Complete Writings: 1975-86 (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1987), p. 25.2 Yve-Alain Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990), p. 231.3 Ibid., p. 232.4 Ryman made what he considers his first professional work in 1955, but his first one-person gallery exhibition was in 1967 and his first one-person museum exhibition was in 1972.5 Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues, 1949, in Charles Harrison and PaulWood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990 (Oxford, uk: Blackwell PublishersLtd., 1997) p. 606.6 A mark is said to be indexical if it points to, or is a trace of, an object. A handprint is indexical but a drawing of a hand is not (even if done inactual size); a cast arm is indexical but a carved arm is not (even if donein actual size).7 In collaboration with Susan Weil.8 In collaboration with John Cage.9 “Klein invented this paint with the help of chemists by suspendingpure, dry pigment in crystal-clear synthetic resin and compatible solvents.Unlike traditional binders, the new colorless carrier did not dull the indi-vidual particles of pigment, but left them with their original brightnessand intensity. The novel medium was versatile enough to be brushed,sprayed, rolled, or even thickened and built up on a surface. It quicklydried to a fragile-looking but durable matte finish that, like velvet, offereda plush, light-absorbent surface that seemed to dissolve into a dark, glow-ing liquid depth.” Source: www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/tour/t60d.html.10 There is, of course, a long tradition of painting partially or whollyexecuted by artists’ assistants, but not with the expectation that the resultis equivalent and execution irrelevant.11 Benjamin Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966,” in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 56.12 Brooks Adams, “More than a Maverick,” Art in America, December2001: 67.13 Malcolm Morley exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 24 February2001, www.galeries.nl/mnexpo.asp?exponr=4624.14 Nicolas Calas and Elena Calas, Icons and Images of the Sixties(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971), p.157.15 Nicholas Serota, Foreword, exhibition catalogue, Malcolm Morley:Paintings 1965-82 (London: The Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983).16 Malcolm Morley, quoted in www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/record.html?record=8.17 The brand name of a cheap board made from wood fibers, commonin Brazil.18 Paulo Sergio Duarte, The ‘60s: transformations of art in Brazil(Rio de Janeiro: Campos Gerais, 1998) p. 30.19 Paulo Sergio Duarte, Antonio Dias (Rio de Janeiro: Edição Funarte,1979), p. 28, fn. 3.20 Gerhard Richter interviewed by Benjamin Buchloh, in RoaldNasgaard, Gerhard Richter, Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson,1988), p. 18 (see complete quote in chapter 1).21 Nasgaard, Richter, Paintings, p. 106.22 Ibid., p. 106.23 Ibid., p. 74.24 Ibid., p. 107.25 Richter, Buchloh interview, in Nasgaard, Richter, Paintings, p. 18.

26 Nasgaard, Richter, Paintings, p. 108.27 Richter quoted by Nasgaard, Richter, Paintings, p. 51.28 Nasgaard,

28 Nasgaard, Roald. Gerhard Richter, Paintings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, p.79.29 Ibid, p. 110.30 Interview with Benjamin Buchloh. In: Nasgaard, Roald. GerhardRichter, Paintings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. p.26.

happen often produces profounder insights than any-thing the artist himself can devise.”23

While Richter’s work is fertile postmeta — or evenpremeta — ground, he has “no patience for the self-refer-ential pictorial autonomy claimed for painting by Amer-ican Formalist criticism, but follows upon more general-ly held twentieth-century assumptions about abstractworks of art as symbolic representations of ideas aboutreality.”24 While he rejects peinture as standing “in theway of all expression that is appropriate to our times”25

Richter nevertheless “perpetuates the tradition of com-mitted Modernist painting.”26 His Ema (1966) “was anti-Duchampian by showing that the figurative tradition hadnot ended, that there remained more to do.”27

Perhaps there remained more to do, but Richterseems to constantly oscillate between the will-to-paintand a sense of its impossibility: “The mood that generat-ed the Grays had to it something of an existential crisis.Richter recalled thinking about the paintings in terms ofJohn Cage’s remark, ‘I have nothing to say, and I am say-ing it.’”28 “If Richter paints from a position of having nocertainties to paint, his solution is to sustain a state of sus-pension as if the most valuable quality that he has to offeris his uncertainty of having anything of positive value tooffer at all. His mixture of skepticism and idealism finallyseems best expressed in the (…) Abstract Paintings.”29

Richter would claim that, under present conditions,this pervasive and chronic ambiguity is “not a contradic-tion. That’s just the normal state of things. Call it ournormal misery if you want.”30 Normal misery captures soperfectly the contemporary condition of painters, and isso pervasive in Maia Rosa’s career, that it would havebeen the title of this book if it did not threaten to discour-age every reader uncomfortable with grief.

leda catundaAnother way of painting without painting is to take a sur-face of printed images and paint over the ones you don’twant, an approach followed in the early work of LedaCatunda, the only artist in this chapter to emerge in the1980s. Although very different from Maia Rosa’s approach,this manner of working in reverse is reminiscent of his,and may also echo the printmaker’s approach of carvingor drawing the reverse image. It also effectively brushesaway any nostalgia for peinture with the “problems” ofnarrative and illusionism.

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9 leda catundaCartoon masking, 1983acrylic on towels, 78 ? x 98 ?”private collection

Maia Rosa (b.1946) began to study art in 1966, the yearWarhol gave up painting. At the time, the medium stillremained lively thanks to the visibility of pop and its var-ious analogues in Europe and Latin America; it was thestorm before the calm. Maia Rosa began his artistic train-ing with printmaking, particularly etching and lithogra-phy, and this process of making the inverse of the desiredimage would resonate nearly twenty years later when hebegan to make his resin and fiberglass paintings. In 1971,when Maia Rosa entered the Escola Brasil:1 painting wasalready in crisis. This short-lived experimental school,where he later taught, left a strong imprint on the histo-ry of art in São Paulo. It was founded in 1970 by CarlosFajardo (b.1941), Luiz Paulo Baravelli (b.1942), JoséResende (b.1945), and Frederico Nasser (b.1945), all ofwhom had studied with Wesley Duke Lee (b.1931), a pio-neer of 1960s Brazilian new figuration. Lee had studiedat the Parsons School of Design, and introduced his fourstudents to a method of drawing detailed in The NaturalWay to Draw, a book first published in 1941. Already inits thirty-first printing in 1969, this classic manual byKimon Nicolaides stressed observation instead of tech-nique and was known for its “blind” drawing approach,in which students drew while looking only at their sub-ject, never inspecting the results until they were finished.It is remarkable how a book and its drawing method hashad such an extensive impact on many São Paulo artists.It was used by a didactic lineage consisting of Lee in thelate 1960s, followed by the Escola Brasil: in the early1970s, and then by Carlos Fajardo, who has taught many

more students since 1974 than the previous two com-bined. Although the Escola Brasil: was not a paintingschool per se, and was both ecumenical in its avoidanceof value judgements and liberal in its preference forlearning over teaching, the transposition of its blind-drawing exercises onto canvas (a practice frowned uponby Fajardo) generated a representational style of paintingcharacterized by loose linear contours imprecisely (asmight be expected from a blind approach) filled in withcolor patches. This blind-drawing esthetic and the tropi-cal pastel palette found in many Escola Brasil: works(and derived from Lee) is exemplified by the uniquepainting, Untitled. 1971, a whimsical collaboration ofLee, Nasser, and Maia Rosa — forerunner, founder, andstudent, respectively. (fig. 10, p. 51).

Maia Rosa had three solo exhibitions that could becharacterized as formative (in 1978, 1980, and 1982)before he developed his signature fiberglass medium in1983. Banhista (fig. 14, p. 53) was included in the first ofthese, held at the São Paulo Museum of Art (masp) in1978; it was one of several canvases that loosely followeda scheme of placing figures against a geometric back-ground. Besides prefiguring the easy transit betweenabstraction and figuration that would characterize hislater work and that seems to be an aspect of postmetapainting, this juxtaposition seems formally linked to thework of Maia Rosa’s friend and former Escola Brasil:teacher, Carlos Fajardo (fig. 12, p. 52), whose exhibition atthe Galeria Luisa Strina in the same year also consistedof paintings of figures against a geometric ground. At the

Dudi Maia Rosa

Every good artist paints what he is.jackson pollock

The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting.barnett newman

One always paints one’s own history.gerhard richter

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10 wesley duke lee, frederico nasser, dudi maia rosaUntitled, 1971oil on canvas, 43 x 51”collection of the artist

11 Bather, 1978watercolor and pencil on paper,dimensions unknowncollection of the artist

time, Fajardo was struggling with the issue of avoidingnarrative without repeating outdated formulas of abstrac-tion. His solution, placing people against canvases andtracing their outlines, introduced an indexical element.

This superimposition of the figurative upon the geo-metric may also explain why Piero della Francesca’sConstantine’s Dream (fig. 13, p. 52), from the Legend ofthe True Cross fresco cycle in Arezzo, is Maia Rosa’sfavorite painting.2

Maia Rosa, although aware of the problems thatFajardo in particular, and painting in general, were grap-pling with, did not address them specifically in the worksshown at masp, and any unease he might have felt aboutdoing a paintings-only show was lightened by includinga variety of whimsical, free-standing ceramic objects.According to Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, the artist’s son andperceptive observer, “to this day the masp ceramics stillseem mysterious and playful to me, connected to myfather’s compulsion to make things, and to make themby hand, all day long — just today he made a table —and there are lamps, chairs, objects always graceful andmarvelously useless.”3 Tellingly, the exhibition cata-logue, instead of being illustrated by reproductions of thepaintings, was illustrated by reproductions of watercolors(fig. 11, p. 51) of the paintings, as if wanting to introducea layer of detachment. This choice may also reflect howthese paintings appear closer to painted drawings, as seenin a comparison between a detail from Banhista and thesame detail from the catalogue illustration, both reminis-cent of blind-drawing esthetic.

Maia Rosa’s second one-person exhibition washeld in 1980 at the artist-run São Paulo Visual ArtsCooperative, and although the problems of paintingremained the same as they had been in 1978, this timethere was an attempt at a solution. Most of the twelveworks on display avoided the traditional square or rec-tangle, and the most extreme juxtaposed canvases ofdifferent shapes (fig. 15, p. 54).

The only traditionally rectangular canvas in theexhibition predates the others, and suggests a juxtaposi-tion of canvases within the picture plane, as Angel (fig.16, p. 55).

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14 Bather, 1978acrylic on canvas, 150 x 250 cmcollection of the artist

12 carlos fajardoUntitled, 1977acrylic on canvas, 78 ? x 118”private collection

13 piero della francescaLegend of the true cross: Constantine’s dream, c. 1450-1465fresco, 129 ? x 74 ?”Basilica di San Francesco, Arezzo

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15 Neo-Noé, 1980acrylic on canvas, 63 ? x 118”collection Stella Ferraz

16 Angel, 1979acrylic on canvas, 59 1/8 x 98 ?”private collection

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17 Sem título, 1981enamel on wood and plastic, ø 82 ?”collection João Sattamini/on loan to Museu de ArteContemporânea de Niterói

18 IO, 1981enamel on wood with elastic bands, 47 x 82 ?”private collection

condition as a cosmopolitan artist living in a majorurban center, part of a culture that is based on advertis-ing and built on the elimination of a previous culture.The use of cast acrylic gives this work an appearance notunlike Maia Rosa’s work and similarly requires paintingfrom the back, but the style of the graphics, combinedwith the smooth industrial-quality casting, mimic com-mercial signage. Vergara uses the material not so muchas part of an investigation of its possibilities but as a vehi-cle for synthetic narrative.

From 1966 to 1972, Ron Davis (fig. 20, p. 59) createdcast resin and fiberglass works that come remarkablyclose to Maia Rosa’s in their method of execution.Davis’s works were made in the years when Greenber-gian post-painterly abstraction was in evidence, andseem equal parts “hard edge” and “fetish finish.” Thoughcontemporary in their use of industrial material, theseseductive works extend traditional modernist practice, somuch so that Davis nostalgically returned to canvas in1972, and has never again looked forward.

In contrast to Maia Rosa’s decision to leave his sur-faces untreated, for Davis: “The front surface is machinepolished and buffed to remove any minute imperfec-tions. Finally the surface is waxed and buffed to com-plete the process and finish the painting.”5 In this erasureof the handmade, Davis’s works are closer to a contem-porary spirit than Maia Rosa’s resin-fiberglass mono-chromes, with their allegiance to the truth of the materi-al. On the other hand, Davis’s work was part of the fiftiesand sixties tradition of painting-about-painting, whileMaia Rosa’s works, because of their later date, could nothelp being a commentary about such metapainting.

In fact, the detachment afforded by the resin-fiber-glass medium was cathartic. By giving him license toreenact a personal and selective history of modernistpainting, it allowed him to work through and exorcise hisinfluences, a wrenching and anxious process. Maia Rosabegan at the end — the monochromes exhibited in 1984and 1985 — and worked backwards, rummaging the pastin the “doors” exhibition of 1986. With two year’s worthof monochromes, why was it necessary to revisit thedeath of painting that had concerned previous genera-

As with other artist’s shaped canvases — notablyRichard Smith’s works in the 1960s — this is an attemptto resolve the problem of illusionism by taking the pic-ture plane into space. Such solutions often prove unsat-isfying because they are solutions to false problems, suchas the notion that illusionism is dishonest, one of the rei-fied tautologies mentioned in the first chapter. Even ifone were to accept the legitimacy of the problem, bythen this path had already been well traveled by artistslike Donald Judd, whose work convincingly projectedthe picture plane into space, and Hélio Oiticica andLygia Clark, whose spatial research went even further,leading to the complete dissolution of the art object.

Maia Rosa’s third exhibition, and the last before theperiod of principal interest for this study, took place in1982 at the Galeria São Paulo. This was his first exhibi-tion at a commercial gallery and his most ambitious todate. None of the eight large works followed a conven-tional format: four were painted wood shapes, two werecanvases with wood appendages, and two were combina-tions of canvases. All were painted with industrial enam-el instead of the usual acrylic. Enamel turned out to bean intermediate step in the progression from acrylic toresin and was, by nature, more resistant to gestural marksthan acrylic. As such, it appears early in the history ofobstacles Maia Rosa placed in the path of his facility or,more specifically, his gestural inclination. The enamelsurfaces (figs. 17 and 18, pp. 56 and 57) were also glossyand created a more artificial look that tended toward thesoon-to-be-developed resin surfaces.

The Galeria São Paulo exhibition was a step in thedirection of Maia Rosa’s mature work. Gestural manner-isms still anchored the works to conventional practice,while restless shapes and volumes manifested a cleardesire to go beyond.

In early 1983, Maia Rosa discovered the mediumthat provided a solution and would become his hall-mark: “I saw people using fiberglass to build a car andthought it would be easy to use this material to makesome free-form stretchers, because that was what I wasworking with at the time. I took a two-hour course andimmediately made this first work. I was enchanted with

the whole inversion process because it had to do withprintmaking, and transparency was a novelty that forcedme to think about the inside of the picture. Since thesurface was transparent, I had to think about what theinner structure would look like. It was a new way ofthinking about what I had been doing, because theworks in the Galeria São Paulo exhibition were moreexpressionistic, and I felt that I would exhaust myself if Icontinued in that vein. The fiberglass, then, came as achallenge to reformulate my work. And the best thingabout it was that the support, the medium, the pigment,they all became one!”4

In other words, what began as an attempt to buildmore complex forms over which to paint was redirectedinto an exploration of the support itself. And in order forthe support to appear, any painting would have to bedone on the back. The resulting surface economy wasthus imposed by the nature of the medium. The desireto paint directly on the front did not die, but rather wentinto hibernation and would resurface periodically, some-times with less than happy results.

Maia Rosa’s casting methods and materials havechanged over time, but in the early years he would builda mold with strips of plastic, lay it on a hard surface (ini-tially the concrete floor of his studio, then other hard sur-faces, such as wooden doors, singly or in multiples, orFormica slabs, covered with anti-adhesive), and pour liq-uid resin, usually mixed with pigment, into the cavity.After the resin dried, he would lay sheets of fiberglassfabric over it and add a second layer of resin, usually col-orless. The fiberglass fabric and the resin would coalesceinto a stiff and transparent surface through which,depending on the color and density of pigment, a deli-cate grid would be more or less visible. During the firstten years he also added a support grid of fiberglass struts.

Before discussing the works Maia Rosa created withthis process, it is instructive to look at two works that, atfirst sight, look like precedents.

Carlos Vergara (fig. 19, p. 59) was one of the pio-neers of Brazilian new figuration; Self-Portrait with Cara-já Indian was created in 1968. The juxtaposition of ani.d. photograph with native Brazilians reflects Vergara’s

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19 carlos vergaraSelf-portrait with carajá indian, 1968painting on cast acrylic, 31 ? x 49 ? x 6”collection Gilberto Chateaubriand/mam-rj

20 ron davisRing, 1968Fiberglass and pigment impregnated in polyester resin, 56 ? x 11’4”The Museum of Modern Art, New York

tions? My sense is that he first had to wipe the historicalslate clean and kill the modernist father before he couldpursue postmeta content, that is, neither self-referentialnor narrative-illusionistic. He did this by replaying thatdeath, visiting its tomb, and moving on.

Unlike Davis, Maia Rosa has continued to battlethis difficult and laborious medium, despite considerablehazards to his health, for more than twenty years (at thetime of this writing). It is significant that an artist withsuch a remarkable facility for drawing and paintingshould choose to obstruct this facility so systematicallyout of the vaguely-understood and recurring intuitionthat he cannot exercise it freely. Arguably, this self-obstruction has proven itself a necessary ingredient of thesuccessful works, but before getting too far ahead, themonochromes of 1983-85 need to be examined.

In the artist’s words, “I immediately began workingon the large fibers, all their structural solutions some-how close at hand, like one of those intuitions whereeverything comes at once. Everything was ‘ready’ in myhead. Strange! How could I have solutions for things Ihad never dealt with before? An engineer emergedbeside the painter.”6

It was perhaps not so surprising that these large worksemerged so decisively because Maia Rosa, overflowingwith enthusiasm for his new outlet (“I was enchanted[with] the transparent pigments that ‘colored’ the resin; ifit wasn’t for the incredibly strong smell, I would havedrunk it!”7), threw himself into exploring its possibilitiesas a medium, in a way not unrelated to the self-referential-ity associated with Greenberg. As mentioned earlier, thisexploration induced a certain formal and chromatic aus-terity in order to highlight the specific characteristics ofthe material and dispensed with the graphic or gesturalactivity seen in the Galeria São Paulo exhibition of 1982.

Maia Rosa has described his condition during thattime as similar to that of Jonah, trapped inside the bellyof a whale. This parable of losing and finding oneself, offollowing or not following the righteous path, has alwaysresonated for him, and earlier had provided the title toComo Jonas (Like Jonah) (fig. 21, p. 61), one of the largestworks in the Galeria São Paulo exhibition.

The artist describes his progression to the first fiber-glass piece, the green oval (fig. 23, p. 62): “My transitionfrom ‘virtual’ Jonah to ‘literal’ Jonah seemed to me tangi-ble and evident. The fact that, because of the resin, I wasworking on the pieces from behind (the interior) mademe feel like I was really inside a whale-work, as if I hadactually been swallowed by the process. The green ovalis also a whale whose structural lines make it look like atarget aimed at the center of the matter (me). I was hop-ing that a constructive process mixed with an intuitive-religious one would balance out this enterprise for me.”8

Maia Rosa is not only referring to the literal fact ofworking from within the body of the work but, more omi-nously, to the feeling that the material had hijacked himand taken him in a direction at odds with his graphic giftsand painterly inclinations. It is part of the “normal mis-ery” of contradiction that the artist felt himself a prisonerof the internal logic of his investigation — one so differentfrom his original intention of building new shapes forfrontal painting — while remaining pleased with theworks and excited with the medium. He was also havingdifficulty reconciling a different contradiction that wouldcontinually surface over the coming years: that the rela-tively cool and fabricated aspect of his new work did notsquare with the notion that art happens in the emotionalheat of manual conflict. He felt that what he was doingwas detached, perhaps even cynical, when it was hisnature to be otherwise. Having an idea and executing itfelt somehow less artistic than having an idea as an inte-gral part of the execution, as a solution to a problemencountered in the hand-to-hand combat of making. Thiswas all very anti-Duchampian for an artist who has alwaysappreciated Duchamp. But Maia Rosa would remain buf-feted by competing internalized constituencies until atleast the late 1990s, and the pendular swings provoked bythese struggles underlay his changes in direction. Some oftheir different demands, manifested at different junctures,include venting the graphic and painterly side; respectingthe I-know-that-easel-painting-is-dead side; surrenderingto the I-want-to-register-my-presence-on-the-surface side;and pleasing the internalized peers (Wesley Duke Lee,Carlos Fajardo, Leonilson). Even after adding the normal

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21 Like Jonah, 1982enamel on canvas and wood, 59 x 137 ?”private collection

tribulations of an artist’s life — economic pressures of themarket, the wayward attention of critics, and the oscillat-ing attention of curators — the picture of internecine con-flict remains incomplete.

To return to the works, the first two mature resin-fiberglass pieces had already been completed when MaiaRosa received a studio visit in August of 1983 fromThomas Cohn, Rio de Janeiro’s most important dealer atthe time. Cohn had liked an earlier work by Maia Rosaat a group show in 1982,9 and had been introduced tohim by the artist Leonilson, a friend of Maia Rosa’s whohad recently shown at Cohn’s gallery. Impressed with thetwo new works, Cohn acquired both on the spot andscheduled a one-person show of resin-fiberglass works for

April of the following year. Encouraged in this newdirection, Maia Rosa completed at least two more worksin 1983.10 These four works ran through basic geometricshapes (apart from the traditional square and rectangle),including the oval, the diamond, the equilateral triangle,and the circle (figs. 22 to 25, pp. 62 and 63).

Notable in the above four works is the decreasedamount of graphic activity and, consequently, theincreasing clarity of appearance — the red circle is prac-tically pure color and structure. The structural supportrods clearly and inevitably perform a graphic role, butthere is an additional and delicate crisscrossing of fiber-glass fabric threads, not visible in photographs, thatwould be drowned by brushwork.

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22 Untitled, 1983polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 67 x 193 ?”collection Renata Mellão

23 Untitled, 1983polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 78 ? x 226”collection Gema Giaffone

24 Untitled, 1983polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ?”collection João Sattamini/on loan to Museu de ArteContemporânea de Niterói

25 Untitled, 1983polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, ø 82 ?”collection Augusto Livio Malzoni

A completely transparent work (that is, without pig-ment) seemed like the next logical step. Transparencybrought to mind glass, glass brought to mind window, andwindow brought to mind Rudolf Steiner, whose teachingsresonated greatly with Maia Rosa. Steiner, who was alsoan excellent architect, designed an iconic window for theGoetheanum (fig. 26, p. 64) in Dornach, Switzerland, theworld headquarters of his anthroposophical movement11.The shape of this window has become one of the symbolsof anthroposophy, and appeared on the façade of theanthroposophical school attended by Maia Rosa’s threechildren (fig. 27, p. 64). Maia Rosa himself became activein school affairs, participating in “many things: theatricalproductions, Christmas bazaars, attending musical events,etc. He was always very involved, having been part, forseveral years, of a group dedicated to the study of Steiner’swork.”12 In Maia Rosa’s words: “The [anthroposophical]window came as a temptation, because I wanted to makea completely transparent work. I thought of Duchamp,13

and when I associated the school window with that singu-lar structure, I just couldn’t resist it. I literally copied thestructural design because it seemed perfect to me.”14 Somuch so that a second work using the same shape wasmade later in the same year (fig. 28, p. 65).

In addition to these paintings, Maia Rosa’s first exhi-bition at the Galeria Thomas Cohn in April of 1984included the following two untitled resin-fiberglass works(figs. 29 and 30, p. 66).

The latter work started as a wall piece but, after atroubled manufacturing process, including a stay inMaia Rosa’s garden where it lay for days exposed to theelements, it ended up as a weather-beaten floor piece.

At the time, the artist expressed his objectives aspurely self-referential: “Today my work is all one piece,and is already born whole as far as structure. (…) I wantto empty my ‘painting’ of any conceptual content, I wantto be a painter empty of ideas, making work that is clearand crystalline.”15

64

26 Goetheanum Building, Dornach, Switzerland, 1924front window, Rudolf Steiner (architect)

27 Façade of the Waldorf School in Santo Amaro, São Paulo

28 Anthroposophical window, 1983polyester resin, pigment, and fiberglass, 82 ? x 96 ?”collection João Sattamini/on loan to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

65

The first exhibition of monochromes was Maia Rosa’smost successful up to that point, both critically and com-mercially, and he felt motivated to continue exploringthe resin-fiberglass process. Over the following year, heproduced a succession of monochromes in additionalshapes (including two parallelograms, a semi-circle, aright-angle triangle, a second anthroposophical window,and shapes approximating the block letters M, N, O, T);eleven of these were shown is next one-person show atthe Galeria Subdistrito in São Paulo in November of1985 (figs. 31 to 33 and 35 to 42, pp. 67 to 75). The non-narrative nature of these works requires little commen-tary and they stand or fall on their ability to deliver a“clear and crystalline” gestalt.

This last work is an echo of IO (fig. 18, p. 57) from1981. A comparison between the amount of graphic activi-

ty in the two versions illustrates a premise that often holdstrue for Maia Rosa: that the amount of gestural activity isinversely proportional to his satisfaction with the moment.When material and form combine at an early stage toachieve a satisfactory unity, the addition of gesture seemsless necessary. But if they do not cooperate, there seems tobe an attempt to advance the work by accumulating ges-ture. The amount of surface activity, therefore, seems tofunction like a seismograph of Maia Rosa’s anxiety or cer-tainty, or of his confidence in the final result. This isinconsistent with the artist’s belief that “less is more,” butconsistent with his notion that artistic solutions occur inthe heat of manual conflict (figs. 41 and 42, pp. 74 and 75).

A pristine monochrome from those years was laterdestroyed (more on why later), the first in several worksthat would, for varying reasons, meet this fate (fig.34, p.69).

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29 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, ø 82 ?”private collection

30 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 84 ? x 51”collection Kim Esteve

31 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

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32 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?”private collection

33 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

34 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”,destroyed. 2005 replica: 43 x 35 ?”private collection

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35 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Kim Esteve

36 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Conrado Malzone

37 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

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38 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Augusto Livio Malzoni

39 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknownStedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

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40 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment andfiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

41 Untitled, 1985polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 118 x 118”private collection

42 Untitled, 1984polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 86 ? x 118”collection of the author

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His third attempt at the time was a monochromecast in the most multi-faceted shape so far, and denselymarked from behind. As mentioned earlier, I believe thedensity of markings functions like a seismograph ofuncertainty, and the same may be inferred here aboutthe number of angles. When Maia Rosa has the viewerin mind, he writes words in reverse so that they appearnormally from the front, but here the word ‘fim’ (‘end’)appears transposed, as if the artist was announcing tohimself that this was the last monochrome (fig. 46, p. 77).

The Subdistrito exhibition brought Maia Rosa’smonochromatic phase to a close. The work producedlater may have more convincing postmeta credentials,but these early monochromes remain unparalleled intheir clarity and elegance; their slightly mottled glossysurfaces are like skin seen up close.

While creating the monochromes, Maia Rosa had torestrain his graphic impulses, which were diverted to othermedia, such as the following work on paper, whose title isderived from the I-Ching Narrow Street (fig. 43, p. 76).

Despite these small outlets, towards the end of 1985Maia Rosa started to become restless. What I havecalled the replaying of the end of modernism had beenworked through sufficiently for his purposes, and therewas pressure from internal constituencies that were notbeing served. The three works subsequently created wereexperiments in what to do next, and were never “intro-duced to society” through the debutante ball ritual of asolo exhibition.

The first of these experimented with an irregular gridof structural support lines. Meant to suggest the facets of ajewel,16 it looked more like a garment (fig. 44, p. 77).

The second work awakened the original purposebehind the investigation of fiberglass, the construction ofirregular support structures to be painted from the front.In this case it was a theatrical shape with a contoured top,similar to a proscenium arch. Partially motivated by theaccumulated frustration of only painting from the back,Maia Rosa set aside the self-imposed discipline of the pre-vious two years and began painting the front, reveling inthe sudden liberty and enjoying the challenge of paintingboth sides. This work, looking like a semi-metamor-phosed chrysalis, seems emblematic of the artist’s polari-ties, half cool and transparent, half gestural and multicol-ored. Though considered successful by many, it did notgenerate immediate sequels, and like most other unre-quited impulses in Maia Rosa’s trajectory, this approachwould manifest itself again (fig. 45, p. 77).

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43 Narrow Street, 1984pencil and crayon on paper, 8 1/8 x 9 ?”collection of the artist

44 Untitled, 1985polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions (checando com a Galeria)courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

45 Untitled, 1985polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Alvaro and Biba Magalhães

46 Untitled, 1985polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Felippe Crescenti

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In a complete turnaround, Maia Rosa then pro-duced a straightforward rectangle, his first conventionalform since 1980, inspired by a Hans Arp print (fig. 47, p.78). This was his first resin-fiberglass work featuring acomposition, and generated a series later referred to asthe “doors.”

The adoption of pictorial content marked a signifi-cant shift in Maia Rosa’s work, and I believe it came aboutbecause of an intuition that, rather than a step back, thiswould be a postmeta solution thanks to the nature of resin.In other words, he did it because he could. He also real-ized that he no longer need avoid basic shapes likesquares and rectangles; the work was so distinct that itwould remain recognizably his regardless of shape or con-tent (in a manner not dissimilar to Lichtenstein). Thisnear-freedom from the possibility of being derivative — orits flip-side, the freedom to be pictorially as derivative ashe wished — was afforded by the distinctiveness of theresin-fiberglass medium. Having first killed the father withthe monochromes, the artist could now afford to honorhim (part of a deeply rooted and ongoing human dialec-tic), so Maia Rosa took advantage of this newfound picto-rial freedom to pay tribute to his influences.

True to the predicament of every artist who lives ina country where direct contact with great internationalart is limited, most of Maia Rosa’s influences came frombooks. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Maia Rosahad avidly collected the weekly installments of the Ital-ian art publication L’Arte Moderna17 and religiouslyabsorbed its contents (Steiner’s Goetheanum was on oneof its 1970 covers).18 The artist collected a total of sixteenvolumes of L’Arte Moderna, each containing betweeneight and ten installments, and many of the reproduc-tions entered the artist’s vocabulary. I write reproductionsand not works because “pocket” or “imaginary” muse-ums cannot provide scale or tactility; a curious conse-quence of this access is that images appear in memory asglossy. To the extent that Maia Rosa’s new “doors” took awalk through the art history books, the sheen of theirresin surfaces was perfectly suited to the texture of pic-ture memory. It is here that the postmeta aspect of MaiaRosa’s work reaches full plenitude: in this freedom tomove because there is no more back and forward in arthistory, in this license to be abstract or figurative becausethe distinction has lost its difference. But this can also bequicksand, particularly for the non-formulaic or non-pro-

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47 hans arpComposition ii, 1958color etching after a watercolored collage, 10 x 10”collection Márcio Maia Rosa

48 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

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grammatic artist, because the compasses (or crutches)provided by an earlier avant-garde teleology19 are nolonger operative, and the field of choices becomesunprecedentedly eclectic.

The second door-shaped work featured a curiousindentation, with markings loosely derived from abstractexpressionism (figs. 49 and 50, pp. 80 and 81).

The standard door height in Brazil is 210 cm (6’ 11”),and since at this point Maia Rosa began to use one ormore doors, side by side, as a platform for casting, hisworks are often 210 cm tall or wide. By adopting thisreadymade shape for these new works, he was also adopt-ing a basic casting module; by repeating it, he couldfocus his attention on content. But the serial repetitionalso introduced a mechanistic element that botheredsome of the internal constituencies alluded to earlier.

When Thomas Cohn visited Maia Rosa’s studio inearly 1986 to discuss their next exhibition, he took animmediate liking to these two new doors. The artist hadenvisioned exhibiting a few monochromes, together withsome or all of the transitional works discussed above, anda single wall of the new doors. But Cohn was not keenon what he perceived as lack of clear direction. Accord-ing to Maia Rosa, Cohn was “very enthusiastic about thisnew work front” (referring to the doors), but suggestedthat the earlier transitional works were functioning as an“anchor, as something harmful to my process.”20 Cohnfound the chrysalis-like work so conclusive of its typethat he wondered “‘what kind of show would it be if thebest work was the oldest or one of the oldest?’ meaningthat it would appear impossible to evolve if the ‘best’work was the first.”21 As a result, Cohn proposed a showconsisting only of doors, to which the artist reluctantlyagreed. Over the next several months Maia Rosa cast anadditional twelve variations, and in October of 1986 ashow consisting exclusively of fourteen doors opened atthe Galeria Thomas Cohn in Rio de Janeiro. For maxi-mum impact, they were all clustered on two of the exhi-bition room’s four walls (figs. 51 to 61, pp. 82 to 85).

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49 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

50 mark rothkono 8 (White Stripe), 1958oil on canvas, 81 ? x 91 ?”private collection (shown sideways)

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51 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

52 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

53 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”collection Augusto Livio Malzoni

54 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”collection of the author

55 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

56 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”collection Pedro Henrique Lopes Borio

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57 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”collection of the author

58 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

59 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

60 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

61 Untitled, 1986polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 31 ?”private collection

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all that comprises it influences, suggests and enforcesideas and qualities.”22 In addition, so much pigment wasused in these works that the transparency of the resin wasno longer in evidence. To the artist, these opaque sur-faces, devoid of tactile or graphic activity, felt somehowwanting. These qualms were fueled when Wesley DukeLee, still an artistic father figure and someone who, inMaia Rosa’s words, “relied on his graphic Colt 45 toresolve any problem,”23 referred to the series as “refriger-ator doors.”24 These scruples, combined with lingeringfrustration at having been diverted from front-paintedworks, gave birth to an increasingly unsettled state ofmind. When Leonilson saw the chrysalis at Subdistritosometime in 1986 or 1987, he was very moved, and thisencouraged Maia Rosa to paint the front of an earlierwhite monochrome with which he had grown dissatis-fied (fig. 34, p. 69). But the attempt was unsuccessful,and ultimately Maia Rosa destroyed it.25 In retrospect,this was the inauspicious beginning of a difficult periodin the artist’s career that included his participation in the1987 São Paulo Bienal and two one-person shows at Sub-distrito in 1989 and 1991.

One inspiration for the doors was an important bodyof Formica works developed by Carlos Fajardo (fig. 62, p.86) in the late 1960s, of which Maia Rosa owns an example.

While Maia Rosa’s doors were not inspired by specificworks (with the exception of the Arp print), they are saturat-ed with art-historical memory, as if drawing on a collectiveesthetic unconscious with a Brazilian bias. The followingworks by Alfredo Volpi (fig. 63, p. 86), Barnett Newman(fig. 64, p. 86), Max Bill (fig. 65, p. 86) and Serge Poliakoff(fig. 66, p. 86) are offered as examples of resonance.

I believe that Maia Rosa’s doors represent one of themore individual and satisfying postmeta solutions to thepainting dilemmas discussed earlier, and are, as such,important to the evolution of Brazilian painting. But notall the artist’s internal constituencies were pleased.Although the artist was proud of the doors, they also rep-resented the detachment of idea from execution, a sepa-ration that preoccupied even Donald Judd: “An artist iscertainly not without ideas and principles but these can-not be completely formulated beforehand, before thework is developed, and then simply embodied. It is anessential of art that the process of making it and the use of

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62 carlos fajardoUntitled, 1969formica on plywood, 28 ? x 71”collection of the artist

63 alfredo volpiFaçade elements and little flag, 1960stempera on wood, 42 ? x 28 ?”private collection

64 barnett newmanDionysius, 1949oil on canvas, 67 x 49”National Gallery of Art, Washingtongift of Annalee Newman, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

65 max billFour groups from the same color elements, 1972lithograph, 25 1/3 x 19 ?”edition of 75 (Marlborough Graphics)

66 serge poliakoffComposition, 1969gouache on paper, 8 ? x 12”courtesy Koch Gallery, Hanover

Invited to exhibit as part of the Brazilian contingentat the 1987 Bienal, Maia Rosa‘s creative pendulumswung away from the pristine order of the doors, in clearreaction to their misperceived sterility. Pulling all thestops, he exhibited one enormous (200 x 500 cm), andeight large (240 x 210 cm) works.26 All but two were heav-ily painted, or hatched, on the front. As a whole, thegroup exhibited an eclectic variety of approaches andtechniques, and there was nothing facile about the evi-dent struggle and uncertainty involved. My sense is thatthe experimentation was not, for the most part, as suc-cessful as Maia Rosa hoped. All except the last work,Amor/Roma, feel like the results of empirical researchthat had not yet found what it was seeking. Symptomati-cally, the largest work was literally a collage of abortedworks, as if combining insufficiencies could generate suf-ficiency. The reception was muted, noticeably amongforeign curators with the power to mount internationalsurveys, and Maia Rosa felt this acutely. It seemed thatby working on the surface, Maia Rosa was taking awaypart of what made it distinctive rather than reaffirminghis artistic identity, as he felt he was doing. There wasgreater, if not excessive, graphic activity on display, andthis seemed to signal anxiety that comes from a suspicionof insufficiency (fig. 67, p. 89).

Maia Rosa himself sensed that something was notquite right: “In the 1987 Bienal I felt like a fly beatingagainst the window. It was a watershed. The chrysalis(approach) gave me the option of saying ‘if it goes wrongon the back I can always fix it on the front.’ As a result, inthe Bienal works, I made a rule out of this fix. Thesewere confusing times, hard on my pride and on my con-victions. I entered a gray zone.”27

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67 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?”collection Monica Radomysler

Even the two black and white works in the showmanaged to look busy. The black one was cast with resinmixed with black pigment, then hatched on the frontwith a burin28 (fig. 68, p. 90). The white, one of only twowithout surface treatment, was made using an interestingprocess: it was cast with unpigmented resin, and after dry-ing was heavily drawn on the back with a graphite stone.A layer of resin mixed with white pigment was poured,followed by the fiberglass fabric, creating a multi-layeredgraphite sandwich29 (fig. 69, p. 92).

An intriguing work bearing the inscription Não Mate oMandarim30 (Don’t Kill the Mandarin) (fig. 70, p. 93) fea-tured what would henceforth become a leitmotif for theartist: a rectangular plaque or slab, either blank or inscribed.

The last work to become ready in time for the Bienal— Amor/Roma (Love/Rome) (fig. 71, p. 95) — provided ahappy ending. While working on it, Maia Rosa made adiscovery that would provide more texture to his surfaces,resolving an aspect that had previously bothered him —their quasi-industrial smoothness. Up to this point, MaiaRosa had been pouring the pigmented resin on his stu-dio’s concrete floor, or on one or more door-size woodenslabs, guaranteeing a certain flatness to the final surface.For Amor/Roma, Maia Rosa placed a sheet of cellophaneover the ground of wooden slabs before pouring the resinand laying down the fiberglass. As the resin and fiberglassbonded and dried, the heat generated by the reactionbetween the cellophane and the resin wrinkled the sur-face randomly. After peeling off the cellophane, the resultwas accepted as a kind of “truth of the material.” Thisprocess allowed him to make tactile surfaces and dealwith the “refrigerator door” objection without recourse tothe culinary arsenal of peinture. Most importantly, theresult was intrinsically satisfying, so there was no need topaint or hatch on the front.

The words amor and roma contain, of course, thesame sequence of letters; only the asymmetry of the Rprevents them from being mirror images of each other.There is also a Magritte-like playfulness about a de Koon-ing-esque gestural abstraction containing the words ‘PopArt’ — written for the viewer because they appear straightfrom the front — next to a pair of kissing profiles.

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68 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”collection Pedro Henrique Lopes Borio

69 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”collection Pedro Henrique Lopes Borio

70 Untitled (Don´t kill the mandarin), 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”collection Thomas Cohn Gallery

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92 93

71 Amor/Roma, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”collection Augusto Livio Malzoni

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Maia Rosa’s next one-person exhibition only hap-pened two years later, and the larger than usual intervalwas due, in part, to his gradual dissociation from theGaleria Thomas Cohn, a development that added to theeconomic and emotional difficulties of those years.Opening in September of 1989, his second show at Sub-distrito featured nine works: an abstract triptych, one tri-angle, two figural verticals, four abstractions, and asquare white monochrome branded with the word‘Lucifer.’ Three of these works, along with one from the1987 Bienal, were subsequently destroyed by the artist, aclear symptom of his dissatisfaction. All were worked onfrom the front as well as the back, and experimentedwith epoxy resin because Maia Rosa was becomingincreasingly intoxicated by fumes emanating from thepolyester resin. In the end, epoxy was disappointing; itwas less toxic, but softer, milky, took longer to dry, andwas significantly more expensive.

As with the 1997 Bienal works, a variety of new tech-niques were on display, but these still seemed moreindicative of unfulfilled needs than of a sure-handedexperimental bent. Borrowing a technique from etching,Maia Rosa wrapped metallic papers around two of theabstract works and then corroded the first with nitricacid, and the second with sodium perchlorate (a causticsalt); (figs. 72 and 73, pp. 97 and 99).

Since the resin remained unaffected by the acid andthe salt, the second of these was also subjected to the“gentle” ministrations of a blowtorch.

In this exhibition Maia Rosa made explicit refer-ence to his religious beliefs for the first time. He did sowith two figural works that I find less successful becauseof the degree of gestural density and graphic instability.The first was St. John the Baptist (fig. 74, p. 100), andboth the saint and the symbolism of baptism are particu-larly important to Maia Rosa’s faith. It was made bypainting with acrylic over a surface formed by pouringepoxy resin on colored sheets of paper (a yellow sheetand a green sheet remain clearly visible near the top).

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72 Untitled, 1989epoxy resin, pigment, gold metallic paper and fiberglass,dimensions unknownprivate collection

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73 Brazilian imagination, 1989epoxy resin, pigment, silver metallic paper and fiberglass,dimensions unknownprivate collection

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75 Untitled, 1989polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 82 ? x 39 ?”collection Ricardo van Steen

74 St. John the Baptist, 1989acrylic on epoxy resin, paper and fiberglass, 82 x 52”collection of the artist

About the second (fig. 75, p. 101) — a body coveredwith a citation from the New Testament: “Awake, Osleeper, and rise from the dead then Christ will enlight-en you!” (Ephesians 5:14) — the artist has commented:“This looks to me like a decomposing corpse, but thespirit is available to rise from this ‘nightmare’.”31 Thescriptural words are carved on the surface while the fig-ure, painted on the back in white pigment, is embeddedin resin, in contrast to St. John the Baptist, in which thepaint is applied to the front and lies exposed.

The work I find most fascinating in this exhibitionis a square white monochrome with a cellophane-wrin-kled surface over an unusually conspicuous support gridof aluminum rods, inscribed with the word ‘Lucifer.’This branding is born of a complex series of accumulat-ed resentments: against the chemical nature of resin, forhaving become an intoxicating prison; against the trans-parent nature of the medium for inhibiting the artist’swill-to-attack-the-surface-with-gesture; and against theearlier monochromes, for having supplanted the artist’sdevelopment with their own internal dynamic. All aresymptomatic of Maia Rosas’s refusal, at the time, toembrace the nature of the approach he had developed.“Lucifer (fig. 76, p. 103) gives you an idea of how myfather was seeing part of his work of 1984 and 1985. Thetransparent pieces, such as a ‘classic’ fiber, were seen as‘Luciferic.’ (…) It could be a sign of his misgivings, atthat moment, concerning his early monochromes. Thiswork was destroyed a few years later.”32

The triptych, which was the earliest piece the exhi-bition, is a reminder of how strong and graceful MaiaRosa’s work can be when the contrasts come together.The middle and right panels are the only ones in theexhibition without surface action, in contrast to the leftpanel, where the resin skin was ripped off to reveal itsinner texture. Maia Rosa embedded sheets of transpar-ent paper in all three panels, as well as Canson paper(left), graphite (middle), and ink wash (right); (fig. 77,pp. 104 and 105).

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76 Lucifer, 1989epoxy resin and fiberglass, dimensions unknowndestroyed

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77 Untitled, 1989polyester resin, paper, ink, graphite and fiberglass, each 39 ? x 39 ?”collection Rodolfo Nugents Family

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Maia Rosa’s next one-person exhibition opened twoyears later, in October of 1991, also at Subdistrito. Thedisastrous Collor Plan of March 1990 had frozen allchecking accounts and bank deposits, making that yearthe annus miserabilis of recent Brazilian history. The artmarket had ground to a halt, both in production andconsumption. “There was a sad climate in the air, andJoão Manoel Sattamini (the owner of Subdistrito) wasvery ill.”33 The artist sees this as the most difficult periodin his professional life, and some of the works shown tes-tify to this condition. “Nearly all the works allude to reli-gious issues, particularly death. Even the invitation was apicture of a dead Christ, and was later destroyed.”34 Nev-ertheless, the technical searching continued, and a newdevelopment was on display: plaster surfaces cast over aresin-fiberglass ground. Unhappy with epoxy, Maia Rosaalso returned to using polyester resin in all the works.

In Nicodemus (fig. 78, p. 107), the plaster is paintedin an impressionist wash reminiscent of late Monet, andthe resin-fiberglass lies entirely buried. It becomes just abase, accomplishing Maia Rosa’s original purpose inadopting fiberglass. But I believe works such as this arepyrrhic achievements, since the effacement of the resin-fiberglass detracts from what is distinctive about MaiaRosa’s work. Not coincidentally, the graphic excessreturns, telegraphing discomfort.

Il Selo (The Stamp) (fig. 79, p. 108) marks, betweenscratchy patches of red pigment, the reappearance oftransparency, a quality not much in evidence at the time.It was cast in a cardboard box from which it was priedloose, giving rise to its title, also an allusion to the bibli-cal Seventh Seal.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was a large plasterwork, reminiscent of a headstone, with the words ‘SantoSepulcro’ (Holy Sepulcher) (fig. 80, p. 109) carved inblock letters. Maia Rosa spread plaster paste on sheets ofwax paper and poured resin on this surface; the humidi-ty of the drying plaster wrinkled the paper in a mannersimilar to the interaction of cellophane and liquid resin.Although the resin and fiberglass lie hidden, there is nosurface painting, allowing the ridges to stand out so thatthe naked plaster look like a porous surrogate resin.

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78 Nicodemus, 1991acrylic on plaster over epoxy resin and fiberglass, 82 ? x 94 ?”collection Museu de Arte Moderna,São Paulo

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79 Il selo, 1991polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknowncollection Kim Esteve

80 Holy sepulcher, 1991plaster over polyester resin and fiberglass, 86 ? x 84 ?”collection Dulce and João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz

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The artist believes that Santo Sepulcro marks the endof this difficult period. It taught him that with resin-fiber-glass works as much as with people, “what matters is whatis happening internally, not externally.”35 This lessonpaved the way for a return to working from the inside,without external markings. The religious reference car-ried over into his next exhibition, held weeks later (checkdate) at Capela do Morumbi (Morumbi Chapel) in SãoPaulo. Although this former chapel, renovated in 1980,had been the site of several art installations of a secular

nature, its symbolic import converged only too naturallywith Maia Rosa’s religiosity. He produced three largesquare works representing the Holy Trinity and installedthem one to a wall. “They were all made the same way, bypouring melted wax and pigmented resin over waxed con-crete. What happened is that they were made one afterthe other, and some of the wax from the previous onealways remained, so that the next contained a memory ofthe prior. First the red (Father), the green (Son), and thenthe purple (Holy Spirit).”36 (fig. 81, pp. 110 and 111).

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81 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 1991polyester resin, fiberglass, pigment and wax, three panels, each 114 x 114”collection Dulce and João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz

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If these works lie at the beginning of Maia Rosa’srecovery of confidence in his own direction, the consoli-dation of this process can be seen two years later, with hisnext one-person gallery exhibition. Subdistrito hadclosed after the untimely death of João Manuel Sattami-ni, and Maia Rosa was invited to show at the GaleriaMillan in 1983. Shortly before, he had an exhibition atPorto Alegre’s Instituto Estadual de Artes Visuais, wherehe cast his largest work ever directly on the gallery floor(fig. 82, p. 112).

This piece shows Maia Rosa fully embracing what isunique about his work, that is, translucent resin reveal-ing subcutaneous activity. Here the entire surface sat ona grid of wooden support bars, and was wrinkled by pour-ing pigmented resin onto cellophane. To be removed, itwas sawed into sections, and was later reassembled for ashow at the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro in 1994. Thisfragile work did not withstand the rigors of moving, andlater had to be discarded.

Coming to terms does not signify accommodation,and new techniques were on display at the Galeria Mil-lan. A quartet of square works featured aluminum sur-faces corroded by sodium perchlorate and nitric acid(figs. 83 to 86, pp. 114 to 117). Since the resin was meant

to be covered, Maia Rosa went back to working with theless toxic epoxy.

For the show the gallery floor was entirely coveredwith a sheet of red resin and fiberglass, poured on siteafter covering the cement ground with aluminum paper(fig. 87, p. 119).

In addition to the four aluminum-covered works andthe red floor, there was a plaster monolith leaning againstthe wall and a surprisingly traditional oil on canvas. Themonolith was the artist’s first “box,” completely filled,with no cavity in the back. The canvas, reminiscent ofYves Klein’s Anthropométries, was inspired by Piero dellaFrancesca’s Resurrection of Christ fresco in Sansepolcro(fig. 137, p. 162), and was intended to symbolize MaiaRosa’s emergence from times of difficulty, but nearlyresulted in the opposite: “My father painted it with hisown body, leaving him green, and probably intoxicated,for almost three months; he became a sort of Martiancomplement to the red floor that he made in the gallery,and that also exuded a stink that transformed that cubicleinto a small chemical hell.”37 Maia Rosa was unhappywith this painting and how it interacted with the otherworks in the show and later destroyed it, his first canvassince 1982, and possibly his last (fig. 87, p. 119).

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82 Untitled, 1993polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 118 x 492”destroyed

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83 Soldier i, 1993aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57”private collection

84 Soldier ii, 1993aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57”collection Ronaldo Graça Couto

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85 Soldier iii, 1993aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57”collection Banco Itaú s.a.

86 Soldier iv, 1993aluminum on epoxy resin and fiberglass, 57 x 57”collection Carmo and Jovelino Mineiro

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87 Exhibition view,with Resurrection, 1993oil on canvas, dimensions unknowndestroyed

Invited to participate in the São Paulo Bienal of thefollowing year, Maia Rosa applied the lessons from theprevious Bienal and exhibited a more balanced andspare group of works, in which the particularities of theresin-fiberglass approach were fully evident. He returnedto the preferred but more toxic polyester resin, and in adeparture intended to emphasize the box-like quality ofthe works, all were leaned against the wall.

The largest work (figs. 88 and 89, pp. 120 and 121), ablue monochrome with a wrinkled surface and a blanktext tablet, was created by laying down a large sheet ofcellophane and constructing, just above the center, asmall rectangular pool into which Maia Rosa poured“some twenty liters”38 of blue resin. On drying, this resinpool wrinkled and pulled the entire sheet towards thetablet. Maia Rosa completed the process by pouringmore of the same pigmented resin into the surroundingarea. The work was then sealed from the back with asheet of blue resin, making it into a box. Both the titleand the aqueous blue refer to the southern Italian fishingvillage of Polignano, the home of Maia Rosa’s maternalancestors before they emigrated to Brazil.

Also on view were a pair of square monochromes,part of Maia Rosa’s continuing tradition of materialresearch. The first, Para Ismael (For Ismael) (fig. 90, p.122), was named in memory of his car mechanic, who hadbeen horrendously assassinated at the time with “hammerblows.”39 The artist made a clay mold into which “hedrove several objects, many of them metallic, such ascans, tools, and other implements, impressing the claywith a certain aggressiveness.”40 After making a plastercast, Maia Rosa was unhappy with the resulting reliefsand, in an eerie parallel to the horrible fate of themechanic, “grabbed a hammer and began to hit the sur-face of the work with great violence until there was noth-ing left except a memory, a ruin.”41 The second mono-chrome (fig. 91, p. 123) was cast by pouring red pigmentedresin over a sheet of white paraffin on which the artist hadscribbled a horizontal line of random numbers, barely vis-ible above the center.

121

88 To those from Polignano, 1994polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 84 ? x 118”collection Zeca Revoredo

89 Sketch for To those from Polignano, 1994polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 1.5 x 1”collection of the author

120

123122

90 For Ismael, 1994plaster and clay on polyester resin, 90 ? x 90 ?”private collection

91 Untitled, 1994paraffin, polyester resin, pigment, wax and fiberglass, 90 ? x 90 ?”collection Metropolis de Arte Contemporânea

124 125

In addition, the installation included a triptych ofquasi monochromes cast over cellophane. Each con-tained a small text tablet with the names Moisés, Elias,and Jesus written on a small rectangular patch of beeswax,a material that also affects the wrinkling patterns of thecellophane. The words look like ancient glyphs becauseof the inverted script, and their religiosity offsets thewordless, secular counterweight of Aos Polignaneses (fig.88, p. 120), which is equal to the triptych in surface area(fig. 92, pp.124-125).

The busiest work in the exhibition was called Venial(fig. 93, p. 127). The words for several venial sins (glut-tony, envy, anger, for example) were written on the backof the piece. It was later sent to the Johannesburg Bien-nial and, upon returning, went missing for so long insidethe labyrinth of Brazilian customs that it was destroyedalongside other unclaimed goods.

The period between the 1994 Bienal and MaiaRosa’s next one-person exhibition, held at Galeria ValúÓria in 1997, was again difficult. Galeria Millan closedand the artist underwent coronary bypass surgery inDecember of 1996. After a month of rest, Maia Rosa setto work as “a kind of proof that he was alive.”42 The gallerywas relatively small and dark, but the artist was happywith the works. With a few exceptions, they were madeusing a new technique: he molded, in clay or Styrofoam,a plaster container with different levels of depth intowhich he poured “liters and liters”43 of pigmented resinto form a thick, viscous pool. Only one color was usedfor each work, but the ultimate shades varied accordingto the depths in the pool, being darker where it was deep,and lighter where it was shallow.

92 Transfiguration, 1994polyester resin, fiberglass, pigment and beeswax, three panels, each 84 ? x 39 ?”collection Ricard Akagawa

126

93 Venial, 1994polyester resin, paraffin, pigment and fiberglass, 118 x 118”destroyed

127

The contrast between São Miguel (fig. 94, p. 129)and Em Nome (fig. 95, p. 129) may help to illustrate this.In both, Styrofoam molds were used to make plastercasts, which were reinforced with a backing of resin andfiberglass. Both plaster surfaces showed the figure of St.Michael, the patron saint of cures, but there the similar-ity ends. In São Miguel, gallons of turquoise-pigmentedresin were poured into the plaster base, forming a pooland obscuring the plaster to varying degrees. Whereverthe pool of resin is deepest, the turquoise is so dark that itappears black, even though the pigment is the samethroughout. In contrast, the rough plaster surface of EmNome was left untouched.

This tonal variation is even more striking in Unti-tled, 1997 (fig. 96, p. 130), which appears to have two col-ors, but only uses one. The underlying plaster base, castin clay, had a shallow internal perimeter, like a squareframe around a square plane. Because of the differentdepths, the perimeter appears lighter than the deepercentral portion. If there was a riddle that asked “what’s amonochrome with two colors?”, this work would be theanswer. As might be expected, these were extremelyheavy works.

The tonal differences are also clear in Bodas (Wed-ding) (fig. 98, p. 131), in which, much as the tips of under-water mountains appear as islands, the white partsappear because the wine-colored resin did not submergeall the plaster.

Bodas is named after Christ’s first miracle, whichtook place at a marriage feast in Canaan: when the wineruns out, Jesus tells the servants to fill six pots with water,which he transforms into the finest wine. This causessome guests to wonder “what kind of host is this whosaves his best wine for last?” — another metaphor for thetransformations Maia Rosa’s work was undergoing.xliv

Not all the works in the 1997 exhibition used thisresin pool technique; besides Em Nome, with its plastersurface, three others, like Ora et Labora (fig. 97, p. 130),featured resin surfaces molded in clay and then pulledfrom the base.

128

94 São Miguel, 1997polyester resin, pigment, fiberglass and plaster, 80 x 40”collection Luis Perego

95 In the name, 1997polyester resin, pigment, fiberglass and plaster, 80 x 38 ?”collection Mario Cafieiro

129

131130

96 Untitled, 1997polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass. 46 x 46”private collection

97 Ora et labora (Pray and work), 1997polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass. 36 ? x 42”collection Stella Ferraz

98 Wedding, 1997polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass. 47 x 48”collection Geraldo Abbondanza Neto

The following year, at the Centro Cultural SãoPaulo, Maia Rosa showed a series of eighteen congesteddrawings reflecting his surgery and newfound sense ofmortality. These works also show the artist’s graphicimpulses beating strongly (fig. 99, p. 132).

Unlike the four years separating the Millan (1993) andValú Ória (1997) exhibitions, the four years that precededMaia Rosa’s next gallery show were among the most con-tented and productive of his career. During this period, hewas able to come to terms, in a lucid and sustained man-ner, with the way his sensibility and his material interacted,which until then had not always been to the satisfaction of

either. In addition to the usual variety of approaches, theexhibition at Galeria Brito Cimino in 2001 displayed a new-found sense of homecoming, of accepting the path thatsometimes appeared to have chosen him. Although theworks still wear their struggles on their skins and nevercome close to appearing facile, they transmitted a greatersense of mastery and maturity than ever before, both indi-vidually and as a group. A wall of door-shaped works con-trasted with a variety of other formats on adjoining walls,and there was a new thematic development: four works inwhich the frames or borders appeared to take precedenceover the picture plane (figs. 100 to 103 pp. 133 to 135).

133132

99 Great ischemia, 1998carbon on paper, 31 ? x 39”collection of the artist

100 Untitled, 2001polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 39 x 39”private collection

101 Narcissus, 2001polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 66 ? x 62 ?”private collection

102 Untitled, 2001polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 67 ? x 78”collection sesc São Paulo

103 Untitled, 2001polyester resin, aluminum and fiberglass, 43 ? x 51”collection Instituto Takano

134134 135

The heaviest work, a variation on the resin pooltechnique, was made by pouring pigmented resin into aclay-molded plaster box with thick white borders. Insidethe box there is an inverted Z whose darkness, ratherthan being determined by a greater amount of resin,was the result of covering the letter with a sheet of lead(fig. 104, p. 136).

One of the door-shaped works used a technique sim-ilar to Aos Polignaneses. Clear resin was poured into asmaller, separate section at the top, and this pulled andwrinkled the entire cellophane surface before pigmentedresin was poured into the lower section. Like Aos Polig-naneses, it was a particularly successful synthesis of manyof the qualities of Maia Rosa’s work. Instead of resisting,the artist made blue and red sequels in the following year.

Named after the Gilberto Gil song Expresso 2222,one of the hymns of the Tropicália movement and asymbol of Brazilianism, 2222 (figs. 105 and 106, pp. 137and 138) is pure postmeta painting, where nothing is as itappears. Painterly matter, or the appearance of sub-stance, derives not from accumulated layers but from thecellophane wrinkles. All painterly gesture lies buried.Conceivably a play on the distinction between abstract(hard edge and monochrome) and representational art— is this a bed or two rectangles? — these works alsohint at what Maia Rosa’s 1980s monochromes mighthave looked like had the artist developed the cellophanewrinkling technique earlier. There is also somethingbrazenly secure about the carnival candy colors, as if allnostalgia for the chromatic subtleties of peinture hadbeen conclusively declared dead.

This confidence carried over into an exhibition inthe following year at the not-for-profit Centro MariaAntonia in São Paulo. In one of the works, the polyesterresin was poured on a glass ground, creating an extreme-ly smooth surface. In contrast to the cellophane wrinkledsurfaces, this work veers close to the “fetish finish” workof the California school, and shows the degree to whichMaia Rosa had been able to unburden himself of theneed for surface accident. It is also one of the artist’spurest works, though it begs the question of whetherpurity, at the extreme, remains a virtue (fig. 107, p. 130).

137136

104 Untitled, 2001plaster, polyester resin, pigment, sheet lead and fiberglass, 45 x 65”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

105 Untitled, 2002polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 80 ? x 30 ?”private collection

139

106 2222, 2001polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 80 ? x 30 ?”collection of the author

107 Untitled, 2002polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 31 x 50 ?”collection Liliana Leirner

138

Another departure was a freestanding work, shapedlike an open book, and reminiscent of a screen. Back andfront were separately cast in the same v-shaped containermade of horizontal wooden slats, and retained the patternof the wood on its surface, in the same way that concreteis sometimes allowed to retain the grain of the woodenmold into which it is poured.

The other four works in the exhibition testified to theusual, and now more confident than ever, diversity ofMaia Rosa’s approaches. They included a blue freestand-ing fiberglass head (fig. 110, p. 141).; a blank blue rectanglesurrounded by an ornate frame of the same color; a redpool of resin showing patches of wax with the wordsprometo (I promise), cumpro (I deliver), and Santo Expe-dito (St. Expeditus, the patron saint of lost causes);45 (fig.

108, p. 140).and a dark black headstone with a gougedcrater where a blank or worded tablet might have been inearlier works (fig. 109, p. 140).

Citation comes naturally to Maia Rosa, whose conver-sation is peppered with memorable quotes from great artists,and while the development of the resin-fiberglass “signa-ture” may have given him license to raid the art historicalarchives, the inclination dates from the beginnings of hiscareer. The recurrence, over the decades, of certain formalmotifs or themes is a related trait, a kind of self-citation. Thefollowing examples of citation and recurrence, some moreconvincing than others, represent threads coursing throughthe work. I have no wish to emphasize the importance ofthese practices, much less to present them in order of impor-tance, only to draw attention to their existence.

141140

108 Santo Expedito, 2002polyester resin, pigment, beeswax and fiberglass, 55 x 63”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

109 Untitled, 2002polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 39 x 31 ?”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

110 Untitled, 2002epoxy resin, pigmented acrylic,styrofoam and fiberglass, 47 x 78 ? x 47”and, in the background, Untitled, 2002polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 63 x 70 ?”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

the outstretched arm

142

111 pablo picassoGuernica, 1937oil on canvas, 137 ? x 305 ?”Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

112 Torso, 1976acrylic on canvas, dimensions unknowncollection Museu de Arte de São Paulo

113 Untitled, 1978acrylic on canvas, dimensions unknowndestroyed

114 Lazarus, 1997plaster, polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 52 ? x 69”collection Paulo R. Maia Rosa

143

anjos

The Anjo (Angel) (fig. 16, p. 55) from the 1980 exhibitionat the Cooperativa was a precursor, in title, to three angelsmade after the artist returned to figurative subject matter.

145144

115 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”private collection

116 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”destroyed

fig.56, p.83

squares

146

117 Untitled, 1971mixed media, 7 ? x 8 ?”collection Márcio Maia Rosa

118 Untitled, 1972mixed media, 38 ? x 39”collection of the artist

fig.96, p. 130

147

juxtaposed squaresor rectangles

148

119 Gilda, 1979acrylic on canvas, 78 ? x 78 ?”collection Clarisse Read

120 Untitled, 1981enamel on canvas and wood,dimensions unknowncollection Lena Alcide

121 Yes, 1982enamel on canvas, 78 ? x 78 ?”collection João Sattamini/on loan to Museu de ArteContemporânea de Niterói

149

yellow inclusionsabstractionscontaining profiles

151150

122 São João com Ipiranga, 1978acrylic on canvas, 39 x 39”collection Mary Porto

123 Untitled, 1987polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 94 ? x 82 ?”destroyed

fig.71, p.95

fig.74, p. 100

Michelangelo

Maia Rosa’s painting of Christ, later destroyed, was basedon a drawing he made of this Pietà while visiting theAccademia in Florence.

Adam and Eve

153152

124 lucas cranach, the ElderAdam and Eve, 1533oil on limewood, 68 ? x 27 ?” eachMuseum der Bildenden Künste,Leipzig

125 man rayMarcel Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter as Adam and Eve in Ciné-Sketch, 1924photograph, 6 ? x 9”courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001

126 Adam and Eve, 1991oil on polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

127 michelangelo buonarrotiThe Palestrina Pietà, c.1555marble, dimensions unknownAccademia, Florence

128 Christ, 1991enamel on canvas, polyester resin and fiberglass, dimensions unknowndestroyed

tablets, with or withoutinscriptions

Piero Manzoni, from thepages of L’Arte Moderna

The title of arobaL te arO is the same as that of its blackdouble Ora et Labora (fig. 97, p. 130), but is written as itsmirror image, as befits an inverse doppelganger.

155154

129 piero manzoniAchrome, 1958kaolin on canvas, 32 ? x 26 ?”Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (Lauffs Collection), Krefeld

130 arobaL te arO, 1997plaster, polyester resin and fiberglass, 52 ? x 47”collection Dr. Flaquer

fig.70, p.93

fig.88, p. 120

157156

131 Untitled, 2003polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 39 x 39”collection Valentino Fialdini

132 Untitled, 1989polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, dimensions unknownprivate collection

158 159

133 Ver juntos-Ponto sonho, 2002polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, each 63 x 31 ?”private collection

134 18 horas, 1997polyester resin, pigment and fiberglass, 37 ? x 42”private collection

fig. 109, p. 140

160

cut-outs

135 Instrument, 1981enamel on wood with elastic bands,dimensions unknownprivate collection

fig.51, p.82

161

I have tried to show how Maia Rosa developed singularresponses to the crisis of painting that lasted from the late1960s to the early 1980s. His work avoids earlier paintingpractices in recognition of their obsolescence while find-ing inventive ways to prolong painting as an innovativemedium. Although the need to innovate is sometimesseen as a dated holdover from avant-garde modernism,human nature tends to find novelty stimulating and rep-etition, after a certain point, insufferable (if we hear asong we love twenty times in a row, by the twentieth timewe will probably hate it, even though the song remainsthe same). In addition to avoiding outdated practices,Maia Rosa’s work displays several postmeta characteris-tics: painting behind the surface; new plastic media; freetransit between abstraction and representation; absenceof signature style; and art historical citation, most notablythe reenactment of the transition from late modernism topostmodernism (or, if one rejects the term postmodernism,from metapainting to postmeta painting). The postmetacharacteristics that are relatively absent are indexicalityand mass-media imagery, but Maia Rosa’s intention wasnever to be exhaustive.

Fundamental among Maia Rosa’s other artistic quali-ties is an esthetic of uncertainty.46 While certainty is com-forting, it is often achieved at the expense of vulnerability,and without vulnerability there can be no empathy, andwithout empathy there can be no intimacy.47 A consistentpath of development is just not true to human experience.Much of the tortured nature of Maia Rosa’s trajectory is dueto his open temperament, often in the grip of doubt andexposed to dueling internal constituencies. His painfulpath has been to steer away from false certainties, to avoidbecoming an illustrator of ideologies or esthetic programs;the reward has been a “zen-catholic” version of “losingyourself to find yourself.” Uncertainty is a friend of ambi-guity, and ambiguity is everywhere in painting that is notpainting, so much so that Maia Rosa occasionally has dif-ficulty distinguishing whether his works appear inverted inphotographs, since he spent most of his time working onthem from behind. This reversible vocation was announcedas early as 1973, in an early painting showing the artist’simage inverted on a windowpane (fig. 136, p. 162).

Maia Rosa’s relatively late blossoming and lack ofidentification, as a mature artist, with any particularBrazilian movement, trend, or group, has stood in theway of the kind of premature success that has made ofmany an artistic career the remembrance of things past.Even when times were most difficult, Maia Rosa nevercompromised on experimentation, even if the resultswere less than satisfactory. Experience led to greater con-trol over the casting process, but never to greater controlover the results, which have always remained a source ofwonder and surprise. His praxis is devoted to counteringMarcel Proust’s belief that “As a rule it is with our beingreduced to a minimum that we live; most of our facultieslie dormant because they can rely on Habit, which knowswhat there is to be done and has no need of their servic-es.”48 It is closer to what Rauschenberg once said: “Mostof the people that I matured with insisted on failure. Ionce asked Bill de Kooning how he felt about some oftoday’s painters who seemed to paint ‘de Koonings’ all thetime. He said something that Gertrude Stein said thatPicasso had said: ‘But they can’t do the bad ones!’ That’strue. I always feel that if I can’t do something that I don’tlike, then I’m losing my touch.”49

In his 1986 essay Painting: The Task of Mourning, Yve-Alain Bois writes that “the latest group of ‘abstract’ painters[thinks that] we can forget that the end has to be endlesslyworked through, and start all over again.”50 Bois concludesthat the end of painting will have to be endlessly relivedfor the remainder of modernism as long as the conditionsthat generated it are still present. This is, in other words, astate of constant resurrection, and it is in this metaphorthat Maia Rosa’s deeply felt Christianity and his artisticpractice find common symbolic ground. As previouslynoted, the inspiration behind the ill-fated Venial of 1994(fig. 93, p. 126) was the Resurrection of Christ by Piero dellaFrancesca (fig. 137, p. 162), Maia Rosa’s favorite painter.

The resurrection, whether engaged literally in workssuch as Ressurreição (1993) and Lázaro (1997), or generi-cally in the artist’s view of his own recovery from artisticand coronary depressions, is a fitting metaphor for theafterlife of painting in hands that can neither give up norturn back, but need to endlessly work through.

162 163

1 The founders adopted the punctuation as part of the name to signifyopen-endedness.2 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 20, 2003.3 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 18, 2003.4 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 20, 2003.5 See The Technique of Ronald Davis’ Plastic Paintings, Ben B. Johnson,Head of Conservation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, inwww.abstract-art.com/RonDavis/b_shows/b6_oklnd/oak_cat/oak35_cat.html.6 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 20, 2003.7 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003.8 Dudi Maia Rosa in emails to the author, September 20 and 22, 2003.9 “Entre a Mancha e a Figura” (“Between the Mark and the Figure”)was held in 1982 at the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro.10 Some of the execution dates are uncertain.11 Anthoposophy “is a kind of study and schooling that leads to concreteexperience of the spiritual dimensions of the human being and the world.The word ‘anthroposophy’ means ‘wisdom of the human being,’ or (…) ‘awareness of one’s humanity.’ Knowledge of spirit can only befound by spiritual means. Anthroposophy offers an inner path of schoolingto attain such knowledge. It takes its starting point from modern criticalconsciousness and our contemporary orientation toward technology and science.” See: www.goetheanum.ch/rsteiner_e/anthro.html.12 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003.13 The artist is referring to two works by Duchamp that are miniaturewindows: Fresh Widow of 1920 and The Brawl at Austerlitz of 1921, as wellas The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),of 1915–23. He also remembers seeing a similar shape in a picture of Francis Picabia’s set for the Ballets Suédois’s production of Relâche(1924) in L’Arte Moderna (see fn. 17).14 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003.15 Frederico Morais, “Dudi Maia Rosa, a Criação de Pontes através da Arte,” in O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, April 26, 1984. Quoted in theexhibition catalogue Em busca da essência: elementos de redução na artebrasileira (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1987), p. 42.16 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 26, 2003.17 Franco Russoli, ed., L’Arte Moderna (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1967).18 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 22, 2003.19 The doctrine that things develop purposively towards an end (from theGreek telos) determined by the thing under development, as a beingmight move towards individual self-fulfillment or a species towards its ostensible perfection. This would be in contrast to a mechanisticevolution without purpose. Source: www.ouc.bc.ca/fina/glossary/t_list.html.20 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 12, 2003.21 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 27, 2003.Thomas Cohn did not recall the conversation, but says that the stanceattributed to him would have been ‘typical.’22 Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 1975-86 (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1987), p. 26.23 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 29, 2003.24 Dudi Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author,September 29, 2003.25 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 26, 2003.26 Each was cast over a ground formed by placing three doors side by side, as can be seen in the trisected surfaces.27 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, September 29, 2003.

28 A burin is an engraver’s steel cutting tool.29 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author,October 6, 2003.30 The title is based on O Mandarim (The Mandarin), a fable by Eça de Queiroz in which a man is given a bell; by ringing he would kill a mandarin on the other side of the globe and inherit all his wealthwithout anyone ever finding out. To the artist, this tale symbolizes the perils of temptation, and is connected to the recurring desire to paint on the surface (Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author,October 3, 2003).31 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 7, 2003.32 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 14, 2003.33 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 13, 2003.34 Ibid.35 Dudi Maia Rosa in a telephone conversation with the author, October12, 2003.36 Dudi Maia Rosa in an email to the author, November 3, 2003.37 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, March 14, 2003.38 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 20, 2003.39 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 22, 2003.40 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 13, 2003.41 Ibid.42 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 13, 2003.43 Ibid.44 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 20, 2003.45 Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa in an email to the author, October 19, 2003.46 I am grateful to Rodrigo Naves for providing the spark for thisformulation. Asked during a talk to compare two important Brazilianprintmakers, he said, “the problem with Lívio Abramo [compared to Oswaldo Goeldi] is that he was too certain.”47 I am grateful to Jerome Wile for this chain of insight.48 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past49 Robert Rauschenberg, published in Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Random House, 1987. p.91.50 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model. Cambridge: The mit Press, 1990. p.243.

136 Self-portrait at the window, 1973oil on canvas, 43 x 47”collection Paulo R. Maia Rosa

137 piero della prancescaResurrection. Christ steps from the tomb while the guards sleep, c. 1458mural in fresco and tempera, 88 ? x 78 ?”Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro

Here we present an anthology of the most recent work ofDudi Maia Rosa, produced after the period covered byOswaldo Sergio Corrêa da Costa’s study which spans theyears from the beginning of the artist’s career to the yearof 2003), showing the artist’s actual trajectory.The Editor

165

annex

167

138 Foreigner, 2003wax, fiberglass, polyester resin and pigment, 77 ? x 78 x 2”collection Galeria Nara Roesler

168 169

140 Untitled, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”private collection

139 POA, 2004pigmented polyester resin andfiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”collection Alexandre Martins Fontes

170 171

142 Donald, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

141 Lamar, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”private collection

172 173

144 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”private collection

143 For Renée, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”collection Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo

174 175

146 Untitled, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”collection of the author

145 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”private collection

176 177

148 Untitled, 2004pigmented polyester resin andfiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”collection Gilberto Chateaubriand/ mam-rj

147 Untitled, 2004 pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”collection Oswaldo Pepe and Ricardo Braga

178 179

150 Untitled, 2005pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

149 Untitled, 2004pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”private collection

180 181

152 Untitled, 2005pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

151 Untitled, 2005pigmented polyester resin andfiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

182 183

154 Untitled, 2005pigmented polyester resin andfiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

153 Untitled, 2005pigmented polyester resin andfiberglass, 78 ? x 78 ? x 3”courtesy Galeria Brito Cimino

biographical aspects

2001Begins teaching drawing at São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art

1984-92Joins an anthroposophy study group in São Paulo

1979Along with other artists,participates in the founding of the Artist’s Cooperative of São Paulo

1973Marries the artist Gilda VogtMaia Rosa. Sets up residence and a studio in the Santo Amaroneighborhood, in São Paulo,where he teaches painting,drawing, engraving and watercolor until 1981

1972Watercolor lessons with Maciej Babinski in São Paulo

1971-1974Enters the Escola Brasil: as a student and then as anengraving teacher, São Paulo

1970Begins to visit Wesley Duke Lee’s studio, São Paulo

1969-1970Travels to Europe and the United States

1968Attends engineering college in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo,for one month

1967Works as an assistant to DiCavalcanti during the executionof the painter’s panel for theJequitimar Hotel in Guarujá, São Paulo

1966Sits in on engraving lessons with Trindade Leal at ArmandoÁlvares Penteado College, São Paulo

1960Begins a friendship with JoséCarlos Cezar Ferreira — “Boi”

individual exhibitions

2004Brito Cimino Gallery, São Paulo,sp, Brazil

2002Maria Antônia University Center, São Paulo, sp, BrazilEngravings, Victor MeirellesMuseum, Florianópolis, sc, Brazil

2001Paintings, Brito Cimino Gallery,São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1999Art Museum of Ribeirão Preto,São Paulo, sp, BrazilDrawings, Vergueiro CulturalCenter, São Paulo, sp, BrazilValú Ória Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1994Volpi Gallery, Cassiano Ricardo Foundation, São José dos Campos, sp, Brazil

1993State Institute of Visual Arts,Porto Alegre, rs, BrazilTorreão, Porto Alegre, rs, BrazilAndré Millan Gallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilMorumbi Chapel, CulturalCenter of São Paulo, sp, BrazilPaintings, Subdistrito Gallery,São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1986Doors, Thomas CohnContemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, rj, BrazilDoors, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Niterói, rj, BrazilFibers, Subdistrito Gallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilFibers, Thomas CohnContemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, rj, BrazilPaintings, São Paulo Gallery,sp, Brazil

1980Paintings, São Paulo ArtistsCooperative, sp, Brazil

1979Watercolors, Pindorama, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1978São Paulo Museum of Art, sp, Brazil

group exhibitions

20055th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, rs, BrazilCromofagia, Nara RoeslerGallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilArt in the Metropolis, TomieOhtake Institute, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

2004Brazilian View, Brito CiminoGallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilAnnual Exhibits Program and Imaginary Line, São PauloCultural Center, sp, BrazilTomie Ohtake in the SpiritualWeb of Brazilian Art, NewMuseum, Curitiba, pr, BrazilTomie Ohtake in the SpiritualWeb of Brazilian Art, NationalMuseum of Fine Arts, Rio deJaneiro, rj, Brazil

2003Tomie Ohtake in the SpiritualWeb of Brazilian Art, TomieOhtake Institute, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

200228(+) Painting, Virgílio Space, São Paulo, sp, BrazilGenius of the Place — Vila Buarque Circuit, MariaAntônia University Center, São Paulo, sp, BrazilMetropolis, São Paulo StatePicture Gallery, sp, BrazilThe Seventies — Trajectories,Itaú Cultural Institute of São Paulo, sp, BrazilCutouts, Brito Cimino Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

185

Dudi Maia Rosadecember 26, 1946São Paulo, sp

His first contact with artisticactivities is through his mother,Renée Maia Rosa, a painter and engraver

187

bibliography

aguilar, Nelson (org). “DudiMaia Rosa”. In. Bienal Brasil Século 20. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1994.amado, Guy. Dudi Maia Rosa.Centro Universitário Maria Antônia, São Paulo: 2003.amarante, Leonor. “Dudi MaiaRosa: nos limites da pintura”. In. Galeria: Revista de Arte, ÁreaEditorial, no 9, pp. 44-49, SãoPaulo: 1988.barros, Stella Teixeira de. Entre a Emoção e a Razão: o Insondável. Valú Ória Galeriade Arte, São Paulo: 1997.costa, Oswaldo Corrêa da. “Onome da rosa é Dudi”. In. Arte emSão Paulo, no 37, São Paulo: 1987.farias, Agnaldo. A Pintura comoCorpo. Catálogo do artista para a 22a Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1994.____. In. Arte Brasileira Hoje.Publifolha, São Paulo: 2002.lagnado, Lisette. “A expressão deDudi Maia Rosa”. In. Casa Vogue,no 1, jan/fev/1987.____. A falta. Valú Ória Galeriade Arte, São Paulo: 1998.leirner, Sheila. “Não sobre o ‘Eu’, mas sobre arte”. In. Arte e seu Tempo. Perspectiva, São Paulo: 1990.mesquita, Tiago. “Maia Rosa sebanha de interioridade”. In. Folhade S. Paulo, Ilustrada, São Paulo:29/ago/2001.moraes, Angélica de. “Pinturapelo avesso”. In. Revista Veja, SãoPaulo: 27/set/1989.morais, Frederico. “Como Jonas,no ventre da pintura”. In. Módulo,n.º 79, São Paulo: 1984.____. “Dudi Maia Rosa: a criaçãode pontes através da arte”. In. OGlobo, Rio de Janeiro:26/abr/1984.pedrosa, João. Dudi Maia Rosa.Subdistrito Comercial de Arte,São Paulo: 1989.

petta, Rosângela. “Um mergulhona superfície da tela”. In. Guia dasArtes. Casa Editorial Paulista, v. 2,no 6, pp.12-14, São Paulo: 1987.plaza, Julio. “Entre (a pintura e seus) parênteses”. In. Folha de S. Paulo, Folhetim, no 301,São Paulo: 1982.pontual, Roberto. “Dudi MaiaRosa”. In. Dicionário das ArtesPlásticas. Civilização Brasileira,Rio de Janeiro: 1969.rezende, Marcelo. A Origem doCrime, São Paulo, Centro Cultu-ral São Paulo: 2004.romagnolo, Sergio. Fluído,texto para exposição coletiva na Galeria Marília Razuk, São Paulo: 2005.rosa, Dudi Maia, Biografia,Cooperativa dos Artistas Plásticosde São Paulo, São Paulo: 1979.____. “Sem urgência”. In. Arteem São Paulo, São Paulo: 1985.rosa , Rafael Vogt Maia. Na Matéria o Santo Sepulcro.Instituto Estadual de Artes Visuais, Porto Alegre: 1993.____. Um Verbo para a Carne.Valú Ória Galeria de Arte, São Paulo: 1997.____. Endoscopia. Centro Cultu-ral São Paulo, São Paulo: 1998.____. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. Artee Artistas Plásticos no Brasil 2000.Metalivros, São Paulo: 2000.____. A Moldura do Sujeito,Galeria Brito Cimino, São Paulo: 2001.zanini, Walter. “Dudi Maia Rosa”. In. História Geral da Arte no Brasil. Instituto MoreiraSalles/Fundação Djalma Guimarães. São Paulo: 1983.vieira filho, Renato. “DudiMaia Rosa”. In. Arte em São Paulo, São Paulo: 1984.

catálogos

Pinturas, Catálogo para exposiçãoindividual no Museu de Arte deSão Paulo, São Paulo: 1978.Panorama da Arte Atual Brasileira1986: Pintura. São Paulo,Museu de Arte Moderna deSão Paulo: 1986.19a Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Fundação Bienalde São Paulo, São Paulo: 1987.Em Busca da Essência — Elementos de Redução na ArteBrasileira. Curadoria e texto deSheila Leirner, Gabriela SuzanaWilder. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: 1987.Brasil Já: Beispiele Zeitgenossis-cher Brasilianischer Malerei. Texto de Paulo Herkenhoff, Carlos von Schmidt. Leverkusen,Museum Morsbroich, 1988.Bienal Brasil Século 20. Curado-ria e organização Nelson Aguilar.Fundação Bienal de São Paulo,São Paulo: 1994.22a Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. Fundação Bienalde São Paulo, São Paulo: 1994.Dudi Maia Rosa, Marcos CoelhoBenjamim, Adriana Varejão.Curadoria Nelson Aguilar. Fun-dação Bienal de São Paulo, SãoPaulo: 1995.Arte/Cidade 3: A Cidade e suasHistórias. Texto Nelson BrissacPeixoto, Lorenzo Mammi. MarcaD’Água, São Paulo: 1997.Perfil da Coleção Itaú. Curadoriae Texto Stella Teixeira de Barros.Itaú Cultural, São Paulo: 1998.Mostra do Redescobrimento. Curadoria-geral e organização Nelson Aguilar. Fundação Bienalde São Paulo/Associação Brasil500 Anos Artes Visuais, São Paulo: 2000.O Espírito da nossa Época — Coleção Dulce e João Carlos Figueiredo Ferraz. Org. Stella Teixeira de Barros. Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo: 2001.

New Work, Museum of Contemporary Art of theUniversity of São Paulo, São Paulo, sp, BrazilNineties Painting, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, BrazilSpirit of Our Times, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, BrazilBrazil 500 Years exhibition, São Paulo, sp, BrazilMark of the Body, Fold of theSoul, Curitiba, pr, Brazil22nd Engraving Show, Curitiba, pr, Braziliii, Brito Cimino Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil 16 th National Visual ArtsExhibition, Museum of ModernArt of Rio de Janeiro, rj, BrazilVoyagers, Itaú Cultural Instituteof São Paulo, sp, BrazilThe Fault, Valú Ória Gallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilMultiples, Valú Ória Gallery, São Paulo, sp, BrazilNew Curatorships, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, BrazilSublime Landscape, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil

19951st Biennial of Johannesburg,South AfricaHavana — São Paulo, JungeKunst aus Lateinamerika, Berlin, GermanyMonotypes with Garner Tullis, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, BrazilCity Art Project, São Paulo, sp, BrazilJoão Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz Collection, mar,Ribeirão Preto, sp, BrazilSender, Porto Alegre, rs, BrazilIdentity Trips, Casa das Rosas,São Paulo, sp, BrazilBiennial Artists in Niteroi,Federal University of Rio deJaneiro, rj, Brazil

1994Brazil 20th Century Biennial, São Paulo, sp, BrazilImperial Palace, Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazilxxii International Biennial of São Paulo, sp, BrazilA Panorama of Present DayBrazilian Art, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1992Sanart, Ankara, TurkeyInauguration of André MillanGallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil10 Years of the Federal Universityof Rio de Janeiro, rj, Brazil What are you doing now, 60s generation? Museum of Contemporary Art of theUniversity of São Paulo, sp, BrazilBrazil Projects, Los Angeles, usaMokiti Okada Foundation, Brazil — JapanBrazil Now, Cologne, Germany

1987A Panorama of Present DayBrazilian Painting, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, Brazil xix International Biennial of São Paulo, sp, BrazilReductionism, xix InternationalBiennial of São Paulo sp, Brazil

1986The Web of Taste, BiennialFoundation of São Paulo, sp, BrazilFirst International Exhibition of Ephemeral Sculptures,Fortaleza, ce, Brazil

19833x4 Large Formats, João Fortes,Rio de Janeiro, rj, BrazilBraziliana and Brazilians, ArtMuseum of São Paulo, sp, BrazilBetween the Stain and theFigure, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, rj, BrazilWatercolors, Universo Bookstore,São Paulo, sp, BrazilContemporary Brazilians, São Paulo Gallery, sp, BrazilDrawing as an Instrument, São Paulo State Picture Gallery,sp, Brazil

1979Two Meters and One Page, São Paulo Artists Cooperative, sp, Brazil

1978Papers & Company, Arts Palace,São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1976sesc Rural Center, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1973A Panorama of Present DayBrazilian Art, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, sp, BrazilYoung Contemporary Art,Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, sp, Brazil

1967Atrium Gallery, São Paulo, sp, Brazil

public collections

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,HollandArt Museum of São Paulo, São Paulo, spMuseum of Modern Art of São Paulo, São Paulo, spMuseum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, spCultural Center of São Paulo,São Paulo, spPadre Anchieta FoundationCollection, São Paulo, spVictor Meirelles Museum,Florianópolis, scDulce and João Carlos deFiqueiredo Ferraz Collection,Ribeirão Preto, spGilberto ChateaubriandCollection, Museum of ModernArt of Rio de Janeiro, rjJoão Sattamini Collection,Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, rjItau s.a. Bank Collection, São Paulo, spsesc sp Collection, São Paulo, spTakano Institute Collection, SãoPaulo, sp and Rio de Janeiro, rjSão Paulo State Picture Gallery,São Paulo, spMetropolis Collection ofContemporary Art, São Paulo, sp

prêmios

Young Contemporary Art (jac) Award, 1971A Panorama of Present Day Brazilian Art, 1987 – mamacquisition award

187186

International data for Cataloging Publications [cip][Brazilian Book Chamber, sp, Brazil]

Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of paintings/ [text by Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa]. — São Paulo:Metalivros, 2005

Bilingual edition: portuguese/englishBibliographyisbn 85-85371-58-7

1. Fine Arts 2. Fine Art — Brazil 3. Engraving 4. Painting 5. Rosa, Dudi Maia — Critique andinterpretation i. Costa, Oswaldo Corrêa da.

05-9037 cdd - 730.981

Indexes for the systemic catalog:1. Brazilian artists: critical appreciation, 730.981

We thank the museums, privatecollections, archives, andphotographers who authorizedthe reproduction of works andsupported the making of thisbook. We especially thank Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa for hisspecial cooperation. Where not specified, the reproductionsbelong to the artist’s or theauthor’s files.

photo credits

Amy Walchlifig. 125

Ana Theophilofigs. 14, 112, 113, 123

Anders Allsten/ Moderna Museet, Stockholmfig. 1

Arnaldo Pappalardofigs. 15-18, 21-25, 28-33, 35-42, 44-46, 48, 49, 51-61, 85-87, 119-121

Bob Toledofigs. 101-107; pp. 184, 188, 189

Caio Reisewitzfigs. 107-110

Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licenced by scala/Art Resourcefigs. 2, 20

Dorothy Zeidmanfig. 2

Eduardo Brandãofigs. 9, 67-71, 74, 115, 116, 122

Eduardo Ortegafigs. 88, 90-99, 130, 134

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, nyfigs. 111, 124, 137

Fernando Chavesfigs. 117, 118, 150-154

files of the artistfigs. 10, 11, 26, 27, 43, 62, 78, 79, 81, 89, 126, 128, 133, 136, 138

Gagosian Gallery, New Yorkfig. 50

Horst Merkelfig. 100

Lorene Emersonfig. 64

Luiz Carlos Felizardofig. 80

Romulo Fialinifigs. 72-76, 123, 131

Scalafigs. 13, 127

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Washingtonfig. 5

Valentino Fialdinofigs. 131, 139-149

artist’s personal web sitewww.dudimaiarosa.blogspot.com

published by

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