A art critic and historian Aracy Amaral participates this Thursday (19), from 19pm, in a conversation with the sculptor and ceramist Megumi Yuasa (São Paulo, 1938), one of the artists participating in the exhibition The Sun's Path, on view until November 14th, at Gomide & Co. It will be mediated by Yudi Rafael, curator of the exhibition.
The collective, which was consulted by Roberto Okinaka, borrowed for its title the first verse of a poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), a pilgrim poet, “a traveler, a perfect figure to think about the idea of transit [ of people, images and ideas] proposed by The Sun's Path“, says Rafael. There are more than 40 artists, through whom the aim is to “present narratives of art in the Japanese diaspora of Latin America based on the travels of Japanese-Brazilian artists throughout the region”, according to a statement from the gallery.
Also present in the exhibition are “cultural dialogues that mark the informal, lyrical and calligraphic abstractionism of the post-war period, also expanding to other trajectories linked to modern and contemporary artistic aspects”, says the text. To this end, Rafael focused on the pictorial and sculptural production of Japanese-diasporic artists from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Japan, “in addition to Latin Americans whose works intertwine with Japanese visual culture based on local cultural and political references ”, continues the note from Gomide & Co.
The Sun's Path is structured around two axes: one vertical – Grupo Seibi, an artistic association founded in 1935 and, around which, names such as Manabu Mabe, Tomie Ohtake and Massao Okinaka gathered, “in a context of great precariousness, because many of these artists came came here as a child and worked on the coffee farm”, points out Rafael; and another, horizontal, which concerns the transnational constellation of post-war abstract art, and which features Kazuya Sakai, from Argentina, as one of the examples present in the exhibition. There are also non-Japanese artists, such as Adriana Varejão, León Ferrari, Mira Schendel and Rivane Neuenschwander, among others.
CONCEPTION
In conversation with arte!brasileiros, Yudi Rafael also says that the first conversations to design the exhibition began last year. According to him, gallerist Thiago Gomide “is very interested in both Japanese art itself and the production of artists of Japanese origin in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. And this notion of diasporas is at the center of art debates today, but now, in The Sun's Path, it clashes with nationalist positions, it goes further, and we look for other genealogies”, he ponders.
Luisa Duarte, artistic director of the gallery, highlights that The Sun's Path “It takes place within a program, within Gomide & Co, which has focused on themes related to Latin America. So we have a singularity, an extremely important exhibition that takes place simultaneously with the 35th São Paulo Biennial, in a similar way to what the gallery did two years ago, with the exhibition Our North is the South, set up at the same time as the previous Biennale”, recalls Luisa. “The exhibition was dedicated to an entire pre-Columbian production that already had, in its DNA, a kind of what would become a certain geometric constructivism in the XNUMXth century. He made this intercession between these very remote works, originating from Latin America, and a modern production of a constructive nature”.
Rafael emphasizes that the works exhibited in The Sun's Path they have cultural particularities, linked to the way of thinking and even the structure of the language of these Japanese artists who came to the Latin American continent. Rafael's objective was to give greater “attention to formal abstractionism” which “had a strong presence in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s”, recalls the curator, and which permeates the set of works on display, authored by artists based here, such as Flavio-Shiró (Sapporo, Japan 1928), extrapolating to names from Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, etc.
Luisa also highlights that the process of creating the exhibition involved a periodic exchange between Rafael and the Gomide team, as a whole. “In which I had one voice, Thiago Gomide had another, so it is really a result of this partnership made over the months, with a routine of weekly meetings”, she says. Rafael points out that The Sun's Path not “an exhaustive exposition”, in the sense of comprehensiveness. We have one party curatorial, especially because it wouldn't be possible to house everyone. Many important figures did not enter because we have limited time and space”, ponders the curator.
“We take a specific period, which is the 1950s and 1960s, a fertile moment, in which we find dialogues throughout Latin America, within abstractionism. Kazuya Sakai, in Argentina; Manabu Mabe, Shiró and Tomie in Brazil, a very strong mark of the Japanese diaspora in informal abstractionism on the continent”, he concludes.
SERVICE
The Sun's Path
Curator: Yudi Rafael
Until 14/11
Gomide & Co – Avenida Paulista, 2644 – São Paulo (SP)
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 19pm; Saturdays, from 11am to 17pm
Free admission
