“Debret’s work is not limited to reflecting on his time. On the contrary, Debret interrogates his time by establishing two distinct studios, in which he produces two absolutely different types of works,” writes the French researcher Jacques Leenhardt in the book Rever Debret, published this year by Editora 34. The author refers to the fact that the artist Jean-Baptiste Debret arrived in Brazil in 1816 as part of the French Artistic Mission. His role was to fulfill government commissions as a painter for the Portuguese court. However, while creating these paintings in his “court studio,” he also recorded the daily life of the population of Rio de Janeiro, with drawings that showed the lives of Portuguese, indigenous, and enslaved Africans. For these works, the artist sat on the sidewalk while witnessing the birth of a nation in his “street studio.”

Lennhardt's book was the starting point for the exhibition "Debret in Question – Contemporary Perspectives," currently on display at the Museu do Ipiranga, where the Frenchman shares the curatorship with the Brazilian Gabriela Longman. The exhibition proposes a dialogue between Debret's engravings, widely disseminated in Brazil, and critical reinterpretations by 20 contemporary artists.

"By all indications, his lithographic plates profoundly marked the imagination of the early 21st century: these, and not others, are the images that several artists of the young Brazilian generation are revisiting, in order to invert them," the researcher points out in the publication.

Debret's engravings are well-known to Brazilians – whether in textbooks or printed on t-shirts, calendars, and even in the opening credits of the telenovela Escrava Isaura (TV Globo, 1976). The curators' intention here is to reintroduce these images into the debate, since they often arrived disconnected from their original critical context.
Upon returning to Paris, Debret dedicated himself to the book *Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil*, printed between 1834 and 1839. The publication brings together approximately 200 engravings made by the artist in Brazilian territory. Unlike the representations of the time, Debret took a keen look at social contradictions: he recorded the urban organization, the relationships between different groups, and the centrality of forced labor in the imperial economy.
Leenhardt emphasizes that the texts written by Debret to accompany the images of the Journey "seek to explain how, in the Brazilian city, the relationships between social strata separated by the exclusion of 'savages' and the marginalization of enslaved workers are organized." This critical dimension faded throughout the 20th century, when his images were massively reproduced without their original context. This decontextualization softened the violence depicted and reinforced idealized views of the colonial past.

The exhibition is organized in two parts. The first features 35 lithographic plates from Debret's book. Following this, visitors encounter contemporary reinterpretations. According to curator Gabriela Longman, the selection of these artists was primarily based on those who had a direct connection to Debret. Some works were already known to the curatorial duo, while others were discovered during the process. In addition, there are two previously unseen works by Rosana Paulino and Jaime Lauriano, created specifically for the exhibition.

Longman explains that although Paulino had never worked with Debret before, the issues present in the exhibition strongly resonated with her research. Therefore, she was invited to create an original work. The result is Tropical Paradise, a triptych that challenges the idea of ​​an idyllic Brazil perpetuated since the 19th century, juxtaposing images and words to reveal the other side of this narrative: a territory marked by extractivism.

Jaime Lauriano, for his part, had already presented an installation in Paris for a more concise version of this same exhibition, shown at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris between April and October of this year as part of the France-Brazil Season. For the Brazilian version, he was invited to create a new piece. In the installation *Brazil Through the Mirror*, the artist expands his investigation into themes such as ethnocide, cultural appropriation, and racial democracy, establishing bridges between the past and the present. Lauriano also presents the photographic series *Justice and Barbarism*, composed of images of violence circulating in the media, especially images of Black men being lynched.

In her book, Leenhardt states that, if history survives as trauma, it “concerns the entire community, demands to be updated, and therefore, worked on,” and it is up to the artist to “reconfigure the traumatic imaginary engendered by violence and extract the poison it contains.” It is within this horizon that Gê Viana's production is situated, whose work stems from the need to rewrite images that marked the visuality of the colonial period. In *Sentem para jantar* (Sit Down to Dinner), her reinterpretation of *O jantar* (The Dinner), Viana eliminates the white characters and places an Afro-Brazilian family at the center of the scene, occupying a space previously organized by explicit relations of domination. The composition suggests harmony, but is traversed by anachronisms, such as the child holding a cell phone next to a modernist chair.

The contemporary collection also includes works by artists such as Dalton Paula, Denilson Baniwa, Isabel Löfgren & Patricia Goùvea, Eustáquio Neves, Sandra Gamarra, and Tiago Sant'Ana, who address themes such as violence, erasure, resistance, and belonging. Another highlight is the room dedicated to the 1959 parade of Acadêmicos do Salgueiro, inspired by Debret and photographed by Marcel Gautherot.


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