credits: Leda Catunda, MAM, 1998. Photo: Romulo Fialdini
Contemporary art is often defined by its embrace of new media and unconventional artistic languages. However, while technologies such as photography and video are frequently associated with contemporary artists, these were already being explored by artists of the modernist avant-garde. Likewise, contemporary artists continue to engage with traditional media and forms of expression, such as newspapers, printed pages, and drawings, integrating these into their visual and conceptual work. Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s photomontages were among the earliest fine art experiments to use photography in Brazil, displaying affinities with Surrealism on account of their dreamlike qualities and symbolic imagery. Antonio Dias’s The Illustration of Art video series was one of the first works of videoart produced in Brazil. The series uses homemade video recordings to question how we illustrate or conceptualize art. León Ferrari, Franklin Cassaro, and Antonio Manuel employ the materiality of newspaper as a means of engaging the viewer conceptually, both through expectations regarding the function of their chosen medium and by inviting various forms of interaction with the shapes and volumes created. Similarly, the works of Artur Barrio and Rodrigo Matheus use decontextualized elements, arranged in compositions that make up material “drawings” and renew the formal and conceptual possibilities of this most ancient of artforms. (G.G.)
