Wild sambas and strict abstractions, vibrating lines and arrangements of eye-popping triangles. Weddings in church and a walk in the park. The rational and the religious, the grid and the carnival collide in Some May Work As Symbols at Raven Row in London. The exhibition shuttles between Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador in the state of Bahia, between conflicting ways of looking and thinking and being in the world.
Subtitled Art Made in Brazil 1950s-70s, the exhibition is both tantalising and wonderfully incoherent, jumping from one place and time to another, between the conflicting strains of the local and the international, and the different strands of Brazil’s culture. There’s pleasure in all the variety, the quiet moments and the humour, only some of which is intended. Based largely on the holdings of four Brazilian museum collections, the exhibition revels in its discord. The sculptures of Candomblé priest Mestre Didi meet Bauhaus-inspired constructionism. Rectangles by Hélio Oiticica jostle on flat backgrounds and characterful birds hunt the riverbanks in a tapestry by Madalena Santos Reinbolt. Puckered globs of paint stamp biliously across the surfaces of Zero Group artist Almir Mavignier’s optically and materially disturbing canvases, and a bull’s glowering head has a fish for a nose in one of Abdias do Nascimento’s emblematic paintings.
