Soft in his speech. Modest, conventional and even neat in dress. A law graduate and member of the bar. José Guedes is not your typical kind of artist. Nor is his work your typical kind of art. If at first you see something, look again. What Guedes gives you isn’t what it seems.
At his recent show at the Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Guedes displayed what at first appeared to be abstract paintings. On closer inspection, you came face to face with a photograph of a puddle in a Fortaleza pothole.
When Immanuel Wallerstein and his fellow political economists gave us world systems theory, they concocted the idea of the periphery. They probably had people like Guedes in mind. If he had grown up anywhere but Ceará, way up there at the far tip of the Brazilian northeast, Guedes probably would have attended art school. After all, he won a regional art award at the age of 15. But as late as the end of the 1970s, state capital Fortaleza, his hometown, had no art school. The dutiful son of dutiful parents who insisted that their boy get a college education, Guedes enlisted in law school. For good measure, when finished, he passed the bar exam.
To those unfamiliar with Brazilian intellectual history, this may seem stranger than it should. Despite the apparent incongruity, there’s a mini-tradition of humanists masquerading as budding attorneys: both Oswald de Andrade and Vinicius de Morais (to mention just two) studied the law.
Guedes took full advantage of this tradition and the sympathy it engenders in some faculty members. During finals one semester he was also preparing for an important exhibition. Overworked and underprepared, Guedes pretty much flunked the test. Or so he thought as he trudged out of the lecture hall.
When confronted by the professor, he expected the worst. “I’m not even going to read your final,” said the legal scholar. “But I’m going to give you a passing grade. I know that I’ll never see you in court, anyway.”
As befits a child of the periphery, Guedes is classified as self-taught. He garnered a few technical tips from assorted locals, but his penchant for abstraction took him far a field of the folkloric painters of picturesque little rafts (jangadas) that take Northeastern fishermen out to sea. Eventually he was pitting strange but true photographs in the vein of Cassio Vasconcellos against rectangles of Rothkoesque monochrome in the same work.
Especially given improved communications and transportation networks, Fortaleza is less on the periphery now than it was in 1950 when Luiz Gonzaga sang of the shock of northeastern immigrants at the sometimes cruel and often unusual customs of the south in the song “No Ceará Não Tem Disso Não” (There’s None of That in Ceará). Curators soon had Guedes exhibiting in group shows in São Paulo. France and invitations to other foreign posts would follow.
The Dengue Fever Sun Series
Much of Guedes’ recent work makes extensive use of video and photography. While continuing in that vein, the works shown at the Galeria Nara Roesler might be dubbed the Dengue Fever Sun series. If they indeed strike the viewer as abstracts, that’s partly thanks to the sunshine that beats down on Fortaleza – one of the brightest spots on earth, according to Guedes himself. (While Guedes claims to base his knowledge on some forgotten scientific study, this correspondent can offer corroborative evidence from serious sunburns.)
Guedes pointed his 35mm Minolta straight down from its tripod. But the reflected upside-down images come predominately from above – the sky, a lamppost, a seemingly whitewashed building across the street. Of course there’s plenty of asphalt, gravel and chipped crosswalk paint. The ensuing confusion is precisely what gives the works their abstract feeling.
But what does dengue (a.k.a bonebreak fever) have to do with this? Once allegedly under control, dengue has enjoyed a renaissance in Brazil over the last 10-15 years. (Again, unfortunately, your faithful correspondent can offer corroborative evidence.) With outbreaks now common in the Northeast, sanitation officials are particularly vigilant about stagnant pools of water that serve as incubators for the mosquitoes that ultimately carry dengue to humans. Precisely the places Guedes sought out for his photo shoots. “I’d be there with my tripod trained on the puddle, and inevitably someone would come up and ask if I’d found evidence of dengue.” The locals took him for a sanitation worker.
If only sanitation workers were so efficient.
Guedes is represented by the Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo
More about José Guedes on BrazilMax
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