Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

On until 5 May 2024

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.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Patricia Ferguson, Each Little Scar at FILET ★★★★☆

Patricia Ferguson

Each Little Scar

★★★★☆

No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread.

Tesfaye Urgessa, The Ethiopian Pavilion in Venice ★★★★★

Tesfaye Urgessa

Prejudice and Belonging

★★★★★

Urgessa’s figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.

A Comparative Dialogue Act, Luxemburg pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Andrea Mancini, Every Island

A Comparative Dialogue Act

★★☆☆☆

Stage fright is real. Cowardice is another thing altogether.

Chronoplasticity at Raven Row ★☆☆☆☆

Chronoplasticity

★☆☆☆☆

This may have been a good joke but it’s just too exhausting to look at.

RE/SISTERS at Barbican ★★☆☆☆

RE/SISTERS

★★☆☆☆

Too many deadpan landscape photographs turn intrigue into fatigue and into paralysis.

Choon Mi Kim, ACID—FREEEE at Ginny on Frederick ★☆☆☆☆

Choon Mi Kim

ACID—FREEEE

★☆☆☆☆

Some forms of abstraction simply scream ‘my kid could have made that’.

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