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General view of the exhibition. Photo: Disclosure.

AAfter visiting the Gomide&Co gallery, in São Paulo, between the end of 2021 and the beginning of this year, the show Francisco Brennand: A primitive among the moderns gets a new version in Rio de Janeiro at Carpintaria (the carioca branch of the Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel gallery). Curated by Julieta González, current artistic director of Inhotim, the exposure It is on display at the carioca house between February 19 and April 9, 2022.

According to the promotional text, the exhibition is guided by Brennand's (1927-2019) claim to have a modern consciousness, while claiming his ancestry, an ancient heart: “My art is modern. […] And it always refers to an ancestry, to some archaisms and, above all, to archetypes. So at this point, I remain modern and purposefully ancient. Especially when I work with ceramics”.

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“Summer Fruits”, 1958-1959, by Francisco Brennand. Photo: Disclosure

In the words of Julieta González, “Brennand chose to work against the current of geometric abstraction and closer to the primitivist inflection that informed his explorations of primitive and archaic forms. Throughout his life, he developed a personal language independent of the dominant artistic narratives that informed the art of his contemporaries in Rio and São Paulo. […] Brennand's approach seems oriented towards a re-enchantment that would imply a return to nature, to archaic traditions and to an alchemical vision that resides in the transmutation of elements and makes room for other forms of life, including that of apparently inanimate objects. ”

In this universe would be hybrids between the human, plant and animal world, eggs giving birth to snakes, sources of life that emerge from the fusion of body parts and sexual organs and a preponderant animistic inflection that run through all his work, particularly in his ceramic sculptures. The show also features some paintings.

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“Spheres attacked by a nail”, 1976, by Francisco Brennand. Photo: Disclosure

The exhibition coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Brennand Workshop, recently transformed into an institute (to find out more, read here article by Miguel Groisman published in issue #57 of arte!brasileiros). It is in the Brennand Workshop that the artist's poetics finds its entirety, according to González's text. “Júlia Rebouças, the Workshop's resident curator, points out that 'by invoking ancestry and evoking cosmovisions, the Workshop exists as art in its immemorial state. It is inscribed in the mineral time of the stone, even though it belongs to the ephemerality of the earth'.”

SERVICE: “Francisco Brennand: A primitive among the moderns”
Until April 9; from tuesday to friday 10am – 19pm | Sat 10am – 18pm
Carpentry: Rua Jardim Botânico, 971 — Rio de Janeiro


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