After just over a year of collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA) and the Secretary of Culture of the State of Goiás, the exhibition "A Sangue no Alguidá" was finally inaugurated at the MoCAA, located in The Crossings, Kendall, South Florida. Goiás is one of the twenty-six states that, together with the federal district, constitute the Federative Republic of Brazil. Situated in the Central-West Region of Brazil, Goiás is a significant agricultural and livestock hub of the country. The culture of Goiás is influenced by rural settings and religious rites. The exhibition was curated and produced by cultural promoter Dayalis Fernández Perdomo and the GALA Foundation, with support from fellow cultural producer and coordinator Maria de Lourdes da Cunha Souza, a consultant from the Antonio Poteiro Institute.
After a controversial censorship in Brazil in 2019, which prompted an urgent installation at the National Museum of the Republic in Brasilia, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MOCAA) gladly hosted this exhibition that offers a captivating reflection on the multifaceted and often disturbing truths of urban experience in both Brazil and Cuba. Together, these artists unfold a fractured and decadent social reality, challenging censorship and celebrating freedom of expression. The exhibition was abruptly canceled by the Museum of the Post Office in Brasilia two days before its premiere in the capital due to its content considered erotic. Gerson Fogaça, whose work has previously contemplated the underworld of Brazilian cities, finds an echo in the work of Gutiérrez, whose literary work delves into the same issues.
On Wednesday, May 8, members of the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas were received by José Renato Ruy Ferreira, Deputy Consul of the Brazilian diplomatic headquarters in Miami. The meeting discussed the Brazilian community in the state of Florida and the possibilities for promoting Brazilian artists in local cultural institutions and galleries. A collaboration project between the museum and the State Secretary of Goiás is already underway. A version of the Artescondido project will be exhibited at the Vila Cultural Cora Coralina and at the Oscar Niemeyer Cultural Center, both in the city of Goiânia.
A SANGUE NO ALGUIDÁ
At my Wit's End
By Dayalis González Perdomo
For Gerson Fogaça
Art is always a search for balance between the surrounding reality and our own personal universe. It is always self-referential and autobiographical, even when it does not aim to be or does not show it. Art always carries historical and sociological connotations through individual psyche.
It is no different for Fogaça. His quest for emotional equilibrium through art began in his childhood, spent in the interior of Goiás State, where, as an autodidact, in an attempt to understand and reorder the chaos around him, he discovered the practice of painting.
As the eldest child in a large mixed-race family, he experienced from a young age the most extreme situations of daily life in the complex rural areas of Brazil in the 1960s and 70s.
When discussing the postcolonial contexts of Latin America and the Caribbean, and as a result of racial and cultural hybridization, we cannot ignore the economic and social aspects that characterize these processes: intrinsic poverty inherited from the slave-holding relationship, which produced a rural and urban population either illiterate or with minimal levels of education or professional training; often without ownership, floating across the vast territories of our countries, whole families traversing still unfinished roads. Patriarchal machismo, violence, promiscuity, racism, discrimination, and the struggle for survival and empowerment spaces, all sedimenting as social components that channel the feelings, emotions, sexuality, spirituality, and religiosity of our people.
This was the backdrop for the boy-adolescent Fogaça; his own life experience, family relationships, and everyday dramas: infidelity, prejudice, illness, death, promiscuity, incest, child abuse, separation, abandonment, poverty faced head-on, the corner cabaret, alcohol, the extinguished stove, the road beyond the small town, help from friends, his own luck, and always in memory, like a strange beacon of light, the coffins of the dead, lined with colorful fabrics, crafted by his carpenter grandfather.
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Canvas | 60 x 193 Inches
Sem Título, Mista sobre tela | 154 x 490 cm
The craft of art then navigates through unexpected influences: a carpenter grandfather, a teacher who encouraged his first strokes, and an emotive intuition for making sense of the world.
Arriving very young in Goiânia, he also lived on the edge, ultimately nothing more than a country boy pretending to be an “artist” in the big city. “Artist”: a profession of the rich and affected, in the prejudiced eyes of the majority of the suburban population and probably also among his peers, residents of the Republic, where success is measured by the centimeters of the male genital organ.
Therefore, his painting could only be that feverish testimony, that heartrending cry of the rural man who wants to be someone in the land of Colonels. It was never made of sweet strokes or pleasant flatteries to the palates of the ladies; it was never sugary, even when for decades it leaned towards landscape. His blue cities that characterized him, and which gradually gave way to these color planes that delve into both the “real” reality and the “psychological” reality, are nothing but his inner struggle, his discontent to this day, of that boy trying to find the balance between the drama of life and the drama of death.
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Canvas | 31½ x 82¾ Inches
Sem Título, Mista sobre tela | 154 x 300 cm
Now, after many years of work, he is a mature man, an artist recognized nationally and internationally, still shy but aware enough to allow his most sublimated demons to emerge. He previously painted naked bodies, carnival and macabre scenes merged with the landscape, but now, he has found in the literature of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, and with the complicity of the aesthetic language of Dirty Realism, enough energy to reconcile with his most intimate experiences, those retained as flashes of light and shadow in his subconscious; and with common universal themes such as marginality and survival, migration, morality, sexuality, and violence.
Today he reveals them to us as if in an old photographic lab: gradually emerging are the coffins of the dead built by his grandfather, the friends who have passed away, the black demon with an erect phallus traveling the world on a bicycle, the naked bodies blending into a pastiche of colors and forms... the male symbols anthropomorphized in bull figures, the female symbols evident in voluptuous breasts, here and there. The color planes stretch across the entirety of the canvas, dramatically cut by black lines that add agonizing sensations, while the painter moves freely from figuration to abstraction over and over again.
Fogaça is no longer ashamed to show the sordidness that is also life. Years of experimentation with painting were necessary to reach this synthesis of forms and contents. I have no hesitation in writing that these are his best works, for several reasons. To understand himself, it was necessary for him to embark on a reverse journey. He started by painting the most distant exterior and gradually delved into himself. This is his best painting because it is the most sincere, the boy Fogaça has merged into the chaos of urban traffic and yet lives in it. In the search for his own identity, we can understand the essence of our own regional and generational identities, we can understand the stereotypes assigned to the mixed-race Latin American man, rural and urban, migrant, poor, conditioned by postcolonial social and economic models. In this sense, his work is not only testimonial but also a thesis of social anthropology.
For Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
I will not begin by writing that I have always known the literary work of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, because it is not true, unfortunately. It is known that his books were published in Cuba quite late, compared to their editions, promotion, and international success; so for me, as for many Cubans on the island, discovering Gutiérrez was a real stroke of luck, when a few years ago a Brazilian artist friend gifted me “Dirty Trilogy of Havana,” translated into Portuguese. Thus, I delved into what is known as Latin American Dirty Realism, of which Pedro Juan is considered a pioneer, in a somewhat contradictory way: for the first time, I could read the most faithful, raw, and emotive description of my own reality, but in a language that was then foreign to me. And it was love at first sight. “God writes straight with crooked lines,” as I later learned from Brazilian popular wisdom, a matter of universal forces. From that moment, I pursued everything I could get from him in Cuba, whether published in Spanish or Portuguese. I researched the origins of Dirty Realism and the possible literary influences in Gutiérrez’s narrative, and accordingly, I also read Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver, and other exponents of North American Dirty Realism; I reread Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote, and Cortázar, and Lezama Lima and Reynaldo Arenas. In the process, I reconnected with my own way of describing and understanding reality, and somehow I reconciled with that teenager who in literary workshops was questioned by her professors for being too graphic and somewhat coarse, in my “journalistic-style stories.”
In my exercise of curatorial research and art criticism, I like to use literary references and parallels. It was thus that one day I borrowed, as an epigraph, a fragment of “Dirty Trilogy of Havana” to explain Fogaça’s chaotic cities: “From up here the whole city can be seen in darkness. The Tallapiedra Thermoelectric plant sending out black and thick smoke, which does not move. There is no wind and the smoke stays calm. An ammonia-like smell floods the city. The full moon silvers everything through that dense gas and smoke haze.” I could not imagine that Fogaça had not only read Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, but that, like me, he loved him and fully identified with his style. More time still passed, during which I accompanied Gerson Fogaça’s international career as a curator, with Malu da Cunha as the team’s producer. And one of those nights in Goiânia, preparing some of the many crazy projects, we came up with the idea of organizing a major exhibition between Gerson Fogaça and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
I think it has been just over three years since then. I returned to Havana, and through another artist, a mutual friend, I contacted Pedro, of whom I had read many of his books but had not yet met in person. I did not know that “like the swallows he shared his life between Havana and Madrid.” I knew a lot about the myth but did not know the man.
Initially, as a curatorial team, we had the idea of a retrospective tribute exhibition of the life and work of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez as a writer and as a visual artist, accompanied by works by Gerson Fogaça inspired by the spirit of Dirty Realism. I had recently seen a similar exhibition in Brussels about the career of filmmaker Agnès Varda, a mix of personal objects and recreation of biographical scenes through visual arts, used as scenography of her life, which was very motivating to me.
Pedro immediately showed enthusiasm for the expressionist vitality of Fogaça’s painting but was very direct about the organizational risks of a project of that magnitude from the first meetings. Thus, it was his practical sense that led us to the Visual Poems that today compose this exhibition and for which we are infinitely grateful, because they reveal, like no other document, the thought processes, the structure, the skeleton that gives body to his challenging and sharp literature. The one that distinguishes him as the writer who bares reality in a brutal way, who synthesizes it without makeup.
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez always insists that his characters are ordinary people, neighborhood folks who inhabit the sordid everyday spaces of poverty, miserable people, prostitutes, pimps, homosexuals, drunks, “tough guys,” dispossessed, survivors in a Cuba that towards the end of the 90s began to experience the toughest economic and social situation, in what was called “The Special Period,” and in which, above ideological and moral values, the most bare reality was imposed. In this context, Baroque and Magical Realism were inappropriate as languages.
What do the Visual Poems tell us? Making use of collage as a technique, as a reminiscence of his material paintings, the artist creates compositional spaces of clear ideological content. His literature has always been an attempt at eschatological social questioning, in which marginal characters structure the body of the discourse, around a Pedro Juan as an alter ego, without the need to outline concrete political judgments. In these Visual Poems, morphological minimalism serves him to pose his own rereading of Universal History up to modernity, to unravel the ideological framework of Western culture and consequently of Cuban and Latin American society. In them, he reviews, from the image, his usual themes: eroticism, sexuality, religiosity, moral constructs, structures of thought, aesthetic values and notions of art, differentiated spaces, social classes, and power mechanisms.
If in literature he goes to the neighborhood as a reference and to Dirty Realism as a language, in the Visual Poems he goes to pop, to the comics he read and sold in the street as a boy, and to graffiti as an expressive resource; to Psychoanalysis and Art History as bibliographic citations. His visual poems are like a rain of ideas, apparently chaotic, exquisite corpses in which we intuit a more intellectual Pedro Juan Gutiérrez compared to the popular Pedro Juan of the neighborhood who traverses his narrative. Both are calculatedly skillful in showing us surgically and without adornments, the social reality.
For A Sangue no Alguidá
As in the ancient ritual ceremonies of all ancestors—African, Indo-European, Asian, or Indo-American and Caribbean—the common man, at the end of the day, has nothing more than his own body to offer in sacrifice.
Modernity has sublimated the magic of the myth that inhabits each of us, has censored the spirituality and corporeality of the spirit. Corporate globalization, the market, and consumption have distorted the concept of heroism in post-capitalist societies. Humanism, as a system of thought, has been our cyclical search for reconciliation with the cosmic order. Trying to understand reality has made us evolve as a species in the struggle to survive. That instinct is written in our DNA and in prehistoric caves. Understanding reality and the man within it is the great apothem of philosophy.
In times of post-truth, manipulation of information, and fake news, where the global society blurs between the appearance and the reality of incorrect policies, it seems that artistic practices and their experiences of individual subjectivity, with a different social-critical spirit, are the closest notion of truth. Gerson Fogaça and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez share this exhibition in Brasília, June 2019, in a complex national and international context, endorsed in the exercise of their own creative intimacy.
It may seem trivial, but both share similar life praxes that would place them in the stereotype of the Latin American male, of mixed origins, poor, marginal, from the interior, rural at first and urban later, become artist-intellectuals, endowed with grace and Creole wit, in a chaotic postcolonial society. However, they are survivors in the crowd, with no greater heroism than their art, metaphor and ritual of body and spirit, like their own blood.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Gerson Fogaça, born in 1967 in Goiás (GO), has conducted numerous national and international exhibitions throughout his career. He received the FUNARTE award in the National Network FUNARTE Visual Arts Program in 2010 and was selected in various contests for occupying cultural spaces, including the Vitrine da Paulista Gallery in São Paulo and the Eletrobrás Furnas Cultural Space. Fogaça showcased his work in Havana, Cuba, at the Carmen Montilla Gallery in 2007 and in other venues such as L’espace d’exposition de Guaran in Lectoure, France; La Ronda Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, Spain; the Contemporary Art Museum of Campinas; and the Portinari Gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His works were also highlighted at the Alejandro Otero Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela, at the Cultural Institute of Providencia in Chile, and at the Contemporary Art Museum of Goiás and Caixa Cultural in Rio de Janeiro, through the exhibition "One Body – Contemporary Art in the Mercosur Countries".
In 2017, his creations were displayed at the Historical and Military Museum of Chile and at the Art Museum of Goiânia in the exhibition "Instinct", as well as at the House of Latin America in Lisbon in the "Symbolic Visions" showcase. Between 2017 and 2018, the exhibition "Non-Place" was mounted at the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas, MACC, Venezuela. Still in 2018, alongside Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, he presented the project "Blood in the Basin" at the Museum of the Republic, Brasília, DF. In 2022, the exhibition "Inverted Scales" was held at the Miami Hispanic Cultural Arts Center. In 2023, Fogaça participated in the exhibition "Braxília" at the University of Miami, USA, and in the showcase "Non-Place", at the Cultural Space of the Brazilian Embassy in Brussels. In 2024, his works were featured in the exhibition.
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez was born in 1950 in Matanzas, Cuba. From the age of eleven, he performed a variety of jobs: ice cream and newspaper seller, kayak instructor, sugar cane cutter, agricultural worker, soldier, radio announcer, and journalist, among others he prefers not to remember. His literary work has achieved increasing critical and public success, being published in 22 countries. He is known for the Havana Center Cycle, a series that includes five volumes of novels and stories: "Dirty Havana Trilogy" (1998), "The King of Havana" (1999), "Tropical Animal" (2000), "The Insatiable Spider-Man" (2002), and "Dog Meat" (2003). He began a new creative phase with the novel "Fabián and the Chaos". He is also the author of several books of poetry. Currently, he dedicates himself exclusively to literature and painting, residing between Havana, Cuba, and Tenerife, Spain.
Among his awards, "Tropical Animal" stands out, which won the Afonso García Ramos Novel Award in 2000 in Spain, awarded by the Cabildo of Tenerife and Anagrama Publishing; and "Dog Meat", awarded in Italy Narrativa Sur del Mundo. In 2019, he held the exhibition "Blood in the Basin, a Look from Latin American Dirty Realism" at the Correios Museum in Brasilia, DF.
LIST OF WORKS
Gerson Fogaça
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Canvas | 60 x 193 Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre cartão | 154 x 490 cm
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Paper | 39½ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre cartão | 80 x 100 cm
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Paper | 39½ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre cartão | 100 x 80 cm
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Canvas | 31½ x 82¾ Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre tela | 154 x 300 cm
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Paper | 39½ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre cartão | 100 x 80 cm
Untitled, 2018 - 2019
Mixed Media on Paper | 39½ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2018 - 2019
Mista sobre cartão | 100 x 80 cm
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 43¼ x 59 Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 110 x 150 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 29½ x 43¼ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 75 x 110 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título | Poema visual sobre papel
110 x 150 cm | 2012
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 43¼ x 59 Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 110 x 150 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título | Poema visual sobre papel
110 x 150 cm | 2012
Untitled, 2001
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm
Untitled, 2012
Visual Poem on Paper | 29½ x 43¼ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 75 x 110 cm.
Untitled, 2001
Visual Poem on Paper | 21¾ x 31½ Inches
Sem Título, 2012
Poema visual sobre papel | 55 x 80 cm.
