Antonio Henrique Amaral, Inside Out, 2021, solo exhibition, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Antonio Henrique Amaral brought a singular voice to Brazilian and Latin American art of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1935, he was part of the generation that came into its own under the authoritarian rule of the military dictatorship installed in Brazil in 1964, having produced some of the most incisive allegories from that period. His visceral work dealt with political violence, existential discontent and erotic desire with the same intensity. His experimental approach challenged hackneyed lemmas concerning chromatic composition, the treatment of surfaces and stylistic cohesion. His blend of visceral attitude with experimental daring makes him not only a key figure in the history of Brazilian and Latin American art, but also an influential artist for the young generations that defy normativities and authoritarianisms.
The challenge to grasp the real was imposed on Amaral in 1964. With the coup d’état that interrupted the fragile Brazilian democracy, the fields that held the most imminent potential for progressivist social transformation – education, agrarian reform, political party organization – were violently repressed, leaving it up to cultural production to take up its role as a channel of social criticism against the growing authoritarianism.
Amaral, who from early on took the technical material development of his production as a process aimed at modifying the inner conflicts in his works, then responded to the ethical imperative that mobilized a large part of his generation: that of issuing critical opinions to confront the military regime and its ideological propaganda.To this end, he possessed an excellent language for the spontaneous expression of criticism, satire, and provocations. Woodcuts can be made quickly, they are reproducible and are associated to the practices that overflowed from the repertoire of modern art. As though seeking to underscore this vocation for printmaking, Amaral began to observe the woodcuts that illustrate the cordel booklets in the popular tradition of the Brazilian Northeast and assimilated some of their typical features. He distanced himself from the existential symbolisms, his line became drier, he simplified his treatment of hachures, and made his characters recognizable as allegories of the country’s political affairs and everyday life. With no fear of using immediately readable symbols, he tried to go directly to the core of the contradictions of his time.
Antonio Henrique Amaral, O meu e o seu: impressões de nosso tempo, 1967, album with 7 woodcuts
Amaral moved to New York, where he joined other expatriate thinkers and artists who found conditions abroad for producing without the constant risk of censorship and self-censorship. He brought with him a new stage in his painting, which gained more and more details in the representation of reality. The real, in his case, was frequently condensed in bananas – countless bananas seen from close up. Associable to the symbolism that had gained force with the tropicalist wave that pervaded theater, music and the visual arts in the late 1960s, the bananas were allegories of a country that lived on the fringe of capitalism and exported its natural commodities along with its symbolic exoticism. Amaral’s use of the bananas referred to those meanings, but expanded them through a chain of associations: a tropical fruit; an underdeveloped country; instruments of cutting, piercing and torture; dictatorship as a state of exception; ropes, knots; suicides and executions.
There is still much to discover and debate about in his work, especially now, when at every point and place there is a search for examples of artworks able to resist not only the authoritarian projects now underway, but also the normativities that restrict the understanding of the nature of desire, sexuality and communication.
Antonio Henrique Amaral, Inside Out, 2021, solo exhibition, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil