Olho do Anhangá (Das Auge der Anhangá)
Seeing Eye to Eye
According to an ancient myth of the Tupi-Guarani - the natives of Paraná in Southern Brazil – all those roaming the jungle are watched by the eyes of Anhangà, the deity of hunting and nature. Any breach of divine laws is under threat of punishment! Thus a hunter who kills an animal that is rearing its young, for example, is pursued and bewitched by the eyes of Anhangà. And the consequences are fever, hallucinations and madness. Does this also apply to present-day destroyers of nature? They also need eternal, divine laws!
In his installation, Forty - whose origins are much influenced by his Tupi-Guarani ancestors, but who also has a European grandfather – refers to the old Anhangà myth. The only light in a darkened room is from bright spots; here six pictorial objects resembling the pupil of an eye hang down from the ceiling on fine threads. The floor is covered with foliage and branches from the forest. The bright colours and twirling or pendulous movements of the suspended pupil images, the effects of light and shade and their striking contrasts, the intense smell of the forest, and the viewer’s sense of being within the installation transform the content and poetry of the Anhangà myth into an artwork to be experienced in three dimensions. Combined with strong light, Forty employs ancient Indio symbols such as the traditional depiction of Anhangà in the shape of eyes as the starting point for his artistic work; a work that is firmly embedded in the context of international contemporary art. He is not referring to an isolated Indio hunter who slays an animal, but to modern man and his questionable relationship to nature and the world. Where do I stand as an individual? Am I still part of the net that holds the world together, or did I fall through its mesh long ago?
Eyes, heads and facial expressions dominate the work group Substrato Humano – large-format paintings from the nineties, in which Forty filtered – so to speak - a distillate of humanity from the confusing diversity of the world. These paintings were received very positively in Europe, for they did not deny their Brazilian roots, while on the other hand fitting quite naturally into the developments of international contemporary art, which had turned back to painting after the extreme anti-painting positions of Concept Art during the seventies. Particularly in Germany, a new expressive painting emerged at the beginning of the eighties. This not only adopted the figurative and representational as its themes, but also readmitted meaning, narrative, social criticism, and even the symbolic and transcendental in many variations. This is clarified when we take a look at various texts written about Forty’s work at that time:
Consciously employing the stimulating sensual quality of the canvas, he makes a playful attempt to represent the give and take of painting arising from emotion and painting from which emotions arise. He awakens magical creatures from memory, from lost eras that rise up from our consciousness or subconscious into the virtual age in which we live. (1)
The heads in Oswaldo Forty’s pictures are both individuals and the masses; they are actors and those acted against, the screaming and the silent, tormentors and sufferers. In these series the individual becomes a link in a chain, ephemeral or the focal point; he appears to be lost in the crowd and yet retains his distinctive mode of expression, however subtly differentiated. Examining the detail of his paintings allows us to make the acquaintance of completely different characters; it reveals familiar, personally experienced or mediated reactions to us, and reflects situations between suffering and rebellion, between oppression and resistance, between omnipotence and impotence, between action and passion.(2)
Perceptions of social reality do not appear only in the spoken or written word. They are also reflected in forms of artistic expression. Oswaldo Forty looks back at his childhood, at the culture of the Tupi Indians in his works. Intuitively, he transfers the roots of those Indian origins into contemporary painting. References back to the past, observation of humanity and the Indians’ religious iconography are key elements of his perception and creativity. (3)
If we consider Forty’s paintings from the Geis Collection belonging to the work group Substrato Humano, we are immediately struck by their painterly aspects as well as their content. Paint layers and structures, colour that traces motion, but also the interweaving of lines and even mounted words define the appearance and effect of these works. Painting dominates, but elements of drawing and collage are also integrated. The individual elements and their emphasis may be very different from picture to picture. Brightly-coloured structures, for example, trigger different emotions in the viewer to accumulations of grey-in-grey. Quite apart from their creative potential, linear symbols and scarcely decipherable words can also become mysterious ciphers, encoded fragments of thought. But only the appearance of the figure in the image - which (in this group of works) is dominated by the head, eyes and gaze – causes the picture-world to directly embrace the world of the viewer. Our gaze meets the gazes directed towards us from the picture. The unusual power of the images, realised by painting, affixes itself onto the viewer’s personality structure due to an emotionally perceived content. Actors and those acted against, the screaming and the silent, tormentors and sufferers – where do I stand? Is it possible to live with such images? Or should we only subject ourselves to their power now and then in a gallery or museum space (rather than experiencing them constantly in our living rooms)? Perhaps we should only visit these people-pictures when we are truly willing to share our thoughts with them?
The Geis Collection not only comprises the Substrato Humano pictures, but also provides a wider survey of Forty’s work groups. One earlier work (cat. no. ???) depicts a female nude whose sumptuous proportions make us think of Botero, a Latin American representative in the international art world for some time now. By contrast to Botero, however, Forty does not emphasise the plump plasticity of the body, but the flat silhouette of the recumbent figure; this is indicated by a sharp, striking outline that becomes an element of the composition of colour fields in the image. In other works (cat. no. ???), Forty abandons body volumes altogether and concentrates on gestures instead. These seem to take over from the symbolism of Penck’s pin-men, which were surely known in Brazil, even before the Sao Paulo Biennial in 19??. Painting as a process of abstraction is a repeated theme in Forty’s work (cat. no. ???-???). The figurative recedes completely into the background so that whenever he thinks he has discovered a representational aspect, the viewer asks himself whether the artist intended it or whether he is merely reading it into the picture as a consequence of his own associations.
Another characteristic of Forty’s work is that he repeatedly readopts elements of past work groups. After the impressions gained at the Ponte Cultura Workshop in 2004, for example, he painted a very narrative image of memory (cat. no. ???), which uses formal elements from the Substrato Humano paintings but embodies a very different, friendly-Mediterranean atmosphere. And in an extensive series of small-format head pictures that he painted in recent years, Forty concentrates fully on the individual head and its expressive possibilities.
Some of the pupil-shaped pictorial objects in the Anhangà installation described at the beginning reappear (scarcely recognisable) in more recent works. Forty fixes them onto a square picture surface and paints over them using white. Their original bright colours are now concealed from the viewer’s eye, but they remain tangible beneath the light veil. The problems of the Anhangà theme recede, making space for brightness and light. The myth of the god becomes a more abstract notion of the transcendental.
Aber ich die Welt ich sehe Dich (But I, the World, I See You) is written on the interior facade of the Neues Museum Nürnberg. This sentence on the wall is the work of Swiss artist Remy Zaugg, who also discusses the relation between viewer and artwork in his panel pictures employing words. His work triggers issues such as: Where do I stand as an individual? Am I still part of this world? Or, as a modern person, am I so isolated that I no longer belong to it? What is the world that claims to see me? Not a deity? And yet in view?
At first glance, Forty appears to belong in a quite different context. But is the contradiction actually so marked? Why shouldn’t Forty - using the Anhangà myth cited at the outset - take up his own Indian roots as a basis with which to position himself in the world of international contemporary art? This does not represent a contradiction, but a source of strength for the future. Closely connected with art developments in Europe and North America for some time now, the art of Latin America in particular is experiencing a new, intense international interest at present.
(1) Alberto Beuttenmüller: Oswaldo Forty und die brasilianische Kunst, in: Erinnerung und Ausblick. Oswaldo Forty – zeitgenössische Malerei aus Brasilien, Thomas-Morus-Akademie Bensberg, 1996, p. 8
(2) Frank Günter Zehender: Köpfe, Häupter, Schädel. Zum Menschenbild bei Oswaldo Forty, in: Erinnerung und Ausblick. Oswaldo Forty – zeitgenössische Malerei aus Brasilien, Thomas-Morus-Akademie Bensberg, 1996, p. 10
(3) Wolfgang Isenberg, Foreword to: Erinnerung und Ausblick. Oswaldo Forty – zeitgenössische Malerei aus Brasilien, Thomas-Morus-Akademie Bensberg, 1996, p. 3
Günter Braunsberg, Nürnberg (Kunsthistoriker)
