MARIE ODILE BRIOT 1990

Marie Odile Briot - Curator - Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - 1990

Presentation text of the multimedia event "Façades Imaginaires".

JAIME PRADES: ARTE IN THE STREET

"The construction of the Place des Victoires (I actually wrote Sainte-Victoire, a telling slip) was not finished on time for the official opening. Consequently the missing facades were replaced by cunning, life-size, painted replicas. I doubt that the mixture of solid stone and papier-mache very much bothered Louis XIV when he made his entrance. Empowered by Divine Right, and possessed of a sense of theatre and spectacle, he adored outward appearances and show, in other words imaginary facades.
Attentive perusal of the guidebooks to splendid mansions reveals that a remarkable number of chateaux were never lived in by those who had them built: for fifteen or twenty years they haunted their dreams, but the building were actually completed after their death. Common people, denied the means to embark on such flights of fantasy, went straight to what was essential, imaginary yes, but tangible: my grandmother, who paid the rent for her beaten earth floor by taking in washing, had a lomb built. Which makes me think that one cannot live better than elsewhere and that there is no better elsewhere than a place beyond the areas marked on maps.
This is why the most incorruptible nomads chose to inhabit time. They live by night, by the hidden face of the Sun, on the planet “Alternative”, revolving in the shadow of diurnal order, like butterflies on the verge of immolation before lightshows.
Ephemeral facades, insubstantial images suspended on immaterial veils lighter than the painted walls. Dresses of light, party clothes and blow-ups to reface the ancient, a sort of electric prestidigitation, on a planet given up to the darkness of cosmic space-time. To the timeless night of lovers and shamans, the 20th century had added the electric night of the illuminated city; “Kill moonlight” (Marinetti – 1909) or “Victory over the Sun” an opera for Malevitch designed the scenery and costumes in 1913 – libretto by Kruchenykh, score by Matiushin); the Futurists were the first to celebrate the unnatural union between towns and the artifacts of artificial light. They believed in the “unanimous” soul of cities and the “simultaneity” of the speed of light. Some even discovered the “unanimity” of races and continents once their differences were expressed in terms of time zones.

“Voce e Tupi daqui ou de la?” - “Are you a Tupi from here or over there?” The Grafiteiros

Six hours further West in another hemisphere, lit by different constellations and a crescent moon that looks the other way lays Sao Paulo, one of the mega-cities of the 21st century. Its population has grown from 600 000 in 1900 to 13 or 15 million at present, initially accumulating waves of immigrants from Asia and Europe until the fifties, and the other from the limitless interior: a complete time zone and thousands of years of history separate Sao Paulo, on the Atlantic coast, from Manaus in the depths of Amazonia, close to the territorial limits of Brazil. It is hardly surprising that the “grafiteiros” consider the walls of their town like an enormous canvas and that there is even a school of graffiti, with its own history, legends and founding father/hero figure; Alex Vallauri, cut down, like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring, in the summer of his life in 1987. Born in Ethiopia, he died at the age of 38. His first intervention dates back to 1978; A Bota preta, a panther-woman in high-heeled boots. (by coincidence the following year, Ernest Pignon’s silk-screen collages were shown at the Biennale). It was the time of the disappearance of the junta. In 1982 his visit to New York established the links between graffiti artist from New York and Sao Paulo. The Las Panteras trio – Alex Vallauri, Carlos Mattuk, Waldemar Zaidler, showed their work at the 1985 Biennale, to which Keith Haring, Denny Sharf, and Penck were invited.
Brazilian critics have identified three generations of grafiteiros: the first, a generation of artistic liberty, characterized by anonymous, illicit spray art; the second was a time of stencils, still very much a nocturnal art form; the third generation marks the move to painting and the open proclamation of counter-culture self-expression, the demand for a more human city. During the 1986 election campaign artists attacked the mental and aesthetic pollution caused by the spray cans of the official candidate and contested politicians’ right to occupy the walls of the city illegally. In line with the purest tradition of western movies and poetic jousting, John Dennis Howard, a North-American grafiteiro who had been living in Brazil since 1973, challenged the politician to a paint-out in single combat on the grounds of urban aesthetics. In media terms he obviously won. The mega-city chose the artist’s urbanity.
Thanks to institutional patronage and private sponsors, they earned the right to mention and the ephemeral quarter of an hour of glory that any true descendent of Warhol can aspire to.
Another Brazilian, born in Madrid in 1957, Jaime Prades (Jaimito) belonged to the Tupinaoda group: Jaime Prades, Jos’e Carratu and Carlos Delfino. The name they adopted (literally translated, “Tupi don’t walk”) is directly connected with the original myth of Brazilian modernity. The Tupis, the tribe that inhabited what later become the state of Sao Paulo, disappeared long ago, but they have left their mark in the mixed Brazilian blood and in the “unanimous” soul of Latin America’s business capital, the majority of whose population is white. For instance, in the umbandist Sao Paulo ritual, the orisha, who “rides” the entrance officiating priest, speaks Tupi.
Oswald de Andrade, the theoretician of Modernism, also spoke Tupi: (Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question”. This “bon mot” which appears in the Cannibal Manifesto (1928, Year 374 after the swallowing of Bishop Sardine) has become a well-known aphorism and point of reference for the art of this century. Under the name of Cannibals, the Brazilians (Oswald) were the first to develop theories on the impact for the planet of the emerging Modern Art non-European cultures, which includes the School of New York: swallow the “lesson” of old Europe in order to bring out art with different roots. To this story of raw or cooked art, Oswald de Andrade gave a symbolic origin, whose historical or legendary basis is not established: in 1554 the Portuguese sent a bishop to convert the Pernambucans. When he arrived, the Cannibals ritually ate him. His name was Sardine.
For a brief instant, the shadow of Sardine and the Tupis, devoured by Modernity, will flutter across the classical façade of the Church of Saint-Louis, in the shadow cast by passers-by in Sao Paulo. A face, a phallus, a breast is never quite the same again, can never be repeated…Picasso, Miro, Jaimito’s light touch reinvent the centuries’ liberties. The cannibals of Grenoble (for each culture is cannibalistic: “constant transformation of taboo into totem” - Oswald de Andrade) will not be disconcerted. And if they hoped for a Good Savage in the skin of a New Wild Animal, it’s just too bad. In the characters formed by the disconnection of line and color, they will recognize artistic thought whose plasticity and rhythm is based on the wall, the work of a contemporary artist: Jaime Prades, 32 years of age, who is only separated from hem by time zones which make of each of them the product of the other’s dreams.

Text of presentation of the work of Jaime Prades for the catalog of the multimedia event "Façades imaginaires", Grenoble, France - 1990.