Untitled, 2014, ink on Himalayan paper, paper 53 × 78 cm, framed 61 × 87 × 4 cm

courtesy of Studio Tunga and Galleria Franco Noero

The Drawings of Tunga

Tunga was one of the most important and influential Brazilian artists of his generation, and he expressed himself through an extremely eclectic variety of media and artistic languages, ranging from drawing to sculpture, to installation, photography, performance, film, video, and writing.

Organic forms and references to parts of the body are recurrent in both the drawings and the sculptures of Tunga. Abstracted or translated into more recognisable objects, the materials and forms they acquire bear a strong symbolic value, creating a surprising but subtle balance between the various elements.

The ethereal series of Anjos Maquiados, take up the surrealist vocabulary of the body and the tension between the conscious and the unconscious: almost liquid images – impressions with a high degree of erotic content – are sketched in visceral tones of pink and vermilion using make-up products. But it is also true of the sublime, delicate Quase Auroras, in which delicate watercolours idealise evanescent, transcendental figures that transform themselves, changing into other bodies or, quite simply, disappearing into the material ivory-coloured grain of the handmade paper used by the artist.

“The watercolors represent scenes that are not completely stable... before the construction of the myth”

The following drawings, created by a single continuous line on extremely thin sheets of Himalayan paper draw on a Surrealist vocabulary linked to the body and psychic automatisms. This means that the works are harmoniously linked together in a sort of space-time concatenation which, as the artist himself puts it, makes them part of a “congregation”.

The corpus of work reflects the artist’s interest in psychoanalysis, and particularly in the childhood phase prior to identification with one’s own body in the mirror.

“I imagined three, four forms which could be developed from the same line. I drew a sinuous line and perceived that the line was a rough outline of a bell, and part of this outline I would be able to continue and transform into the outline of a goblet, of a chalice, and I could go on and transform this outline into the outline of a bottle, and from this outline, a funnel, and so I went on aggregating forms, all originating in a common line, and I gave them volume and made them turn on an axis.”