Experiment Experiência continued the preference of international curators to bring Brazilian art to a wider audience and with it some well deserved attention that added some pages to even the most basic art history text in the early 21st century.
As well as serving to highlight the work of leading Brazilian contemporaries including Tunga (Jose de Barros Carvalho e Mello) and Ernesto Neto, both of whom are featuring in this years Venice Biennale, and Rivane Neuenschwander with her ‘organic minimalism’, the show was also a testament to, and document for over forty years of the countries differing art practices.
Tunga’s work has ranged from his ‘Catholic Saint series’ of sculptural abstractions, minimalist in their form yet romantic in conception to performances in which he braids two snakes together before their release, an action that could be considered somewhat shamanic.
Tunga’s floor based sculpture, "My Name" is a Brazilian stance on the Beuysian use of material and substance as concept, the forces of magnetism and electricity alongside the poetic formality of glass, to create either equilibrium or imbalance, viewed from his shamanic position.
The result is a haunted poetic minimalism as precise in its form as in its juxtaposition of materials, and could be seen through its title to follow on from those earlier sculptural abstractions relating to the saints.
‘I work around the space of the body’; Ernesto Neto is probably the most internationally recognised of all the Brazilian contemporaries. With his sculpture and installation made of stretchy translucencies of stocking-like gauze, often filled with aromatic spices or malleable spheres of polystyrene. "Anatomy of the Hanging Life" is a wall-based sculpture displaying Neto’s fascination with topology and art form as "body".
A vessel wrapped with a kind of circulatory system, suggesting the interplay between microcosm and macrocosm that also serves to describe a sculptural surface. Neto’s work incorporates the idea of boundaries with a formal and emotional balance resulting in a highly sensual sculptural body.
The work has a duel facility to discuss both the human form sensually and systemically whilst concerning itself with traditional sculptural language: formal relationships, positive and negative space, internal and external structure.
At once a dialogue surrounding both sculptural practise and the human body, a merging of definitions. As Neto has said himself, ‘Sculpture as a fine animal’.
Rivane Neuenschwander’s art has been praised for its evocative and gentle beauty, elements that are well represented in her work "Inventory of Small Deaths". This is a slow motion black and white projection of a bubble, blown by the artist, floating over a Brazilian landscape.
The work suggests an ephemeral state, possessing a refined subtlety and serenity empathic to transformation. At once poetic and a metaphor for organic life and its impermanence, this autonomous dance, that of the artist transposing her ‘contents’ into the bubble to witness its short life, is also the artist sculpting her own breath in a display of precise simplicity and delicate beauty.
