The premise of this ambitious but unavoidably manipulative review of Brazilian aesthetics is that art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself. Raven Row’s programme has long mined Britain’s 1970s for this phenomenon. Now Brazil – a timeline familiar to art historians but distant enough to do the curator’s bidding – offers its turning points as a destination. 

The show’s trick is to contrast communal and ritual works with the greatest hits of Brazil’s geometric abstraction. Elisa Martins da Silveira’s carnival street scenes hang next to Lydia Pepe’s monochrome grids as though there was nothing between them. This tactic makes the chasm between the thesis ideas wide enough to swallow all nuance. The meme which rhetorically compels the lost “modern man” to “reject modernity” and “embrace tradition” might thus have been an apposite poster for this exhibition. 

The project recovers, however, precisely in repetition and excess. Each turn has a standout and both the past and the future finally have their aesthetic triumphs. Looking on from the crossroads, it’s hard not to marvel at Willys de Castro’s spirit-level paintings and then not to sing with the wild birds of Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s affectedly naive tapestries. The same, crucially, is true in reverse.