( this isn't an anti american, english, anglicans in general, or anti-germans. anti-europeans or anti-brazilians post. This isn't even an anti-new age post.... this is a declaration of cultural freedom )
How dare you, spoilt privileged , to deny me God, truth, beauty, and life ?
I am going to built my own.
This is how I have been and felt for my entire life.
And art is the best way to illustrate this even if it happens in every single aspect of life.
Here I am, born, raised, living and working in Sao Paulo, a 100% modernist and contemporary city with 18 millions of citizens.
I understand when spoilt kids in Europe and USA grow up and start to defend contemporary aesthetical values as it was the new religion, and it is, it is for then. They abandoned God on the 19th century to embrace science and logic, but it failed demonstrating itself fragile and always easy to be manipulated..... so for the last decades they have embraced art as it was the salvation for human kind, not considering it as even more fragile and much easier to manipulate.
For the last decades we all have seen Anglican flags all over the world ( but made in everywhere by everyone) , telling us what to do with our lives and values.
It is the Anglican-hegemony-propaganda pretending that almost serves very well to their purposes but not even try to fake its results for me and who else is at this side of the wall.
If I was a naive kid in Europe or USA now I would probably be very impressed and very enthusiastic about contemporary aesthetical and philosophy now. I would say things like Warhol is brilliant or Ai Wei Wei is a hero.... as these are both examples of extremely boring and shallow people that knows very well its audience and don't have any ethic when it is about to manipulate then. And they do it so easily.
Being in Europe I imagined myself how it would be if I had been born and raised among those constructions that exist for centuries, everyday of my life looking to the same things, I
would be really bothered, nothing changes or can be changed, doesn't matter how beautiful it all is. So any proposal for new aesthetical value would sound like salvation to me , I would be really exited and enchanted for this call....How can a person like that resist this kind of seductuion: new trends for this , new treds for that... ?
But there is a problem, this current call is very seductive.. and what it offers? Individualism, not individuality, lack of connection with the world. Lack of harmony. Selfishness
With no harmony there is no life. Trust me.
Why do I tell you to trust me ? Because I believe on this ? No, because I live on the first world's lab.... everything the power of the first world potencies want to put in practice they test first here in South America decades before, so I can say I am living what is a considered good theory in Europe and USA. It is happening. Sao Paulo is a city entirely built on modernist and contemporary aesthetical and ethical values. Does it work ? No, for nobody, not for the poor and absolute not for the elites too. This city fails in every single aspect for everyone. Current architecture, current urbanism, current politic, current economy, current art... no life quality...... it isn't made for humans.
Ok, It all sounds like a very juvenile 6th grade's rant, and it is. And I know very serious people with huge public influence would say it is nonsense.
So why I am taking time to write about it all ?
My work. As you know everything in my life turns around my work and my work turns around everything in my life. Not the life proposed to me, but the life I built its own values and called Aterces Adiv-Mein Welt.
I do consider my work as a total lack of synchronicity with the current art. It because of the origins but much more because of the target it has, the values implicit and the intentions that build it.
The current art we can see today, made or not in Anglican countries by English descendant people it doesn't matter, it all obeys the Anglican values, has basically two origins... or it comes from Cezane and the early Parisiense modernism, including the north Americans abstract expressionism ( but of CIA propaganda they were instructed to do not confess it but only to present themselves as a fresh genuine new art ), or it comes from Goya and Bosh , resulting in all the pop art, the sensation generation and the actual gossip girls from NY, all very smart but absolute not intelligent or deep.
But can we call it Anglican art even having as origins other cultures from other centuries? Yes. It has the imperialism intention of imposition of values transforming artists, curators, art dealers and audience in puppets. They are all victms as we are. Today you can't even point fingers and blame someone. The difference is that someones have profit with it and others have its life ruined.
They have interest to destroy old values for three reasons. I am only going to talk about two. As the tird one and most important isn't for the public.
First - It is a culture that for centuries producing painting and art has never created a genius. Never a great artist, even now they want to convince us that Turner was a great painter. But the ones that understand anything about painting know he was a mere mediocre tentative of approaching of the real art made in Europe of that time. As everything English made all the centuries, always mediocre and provincial. Always a stolen imitation. So you can imagine an Empire that desires to have cultural influence all over the world must to feel a huge resentment of aesthetical values they were never able to dominate.
But England never was able to impose it's own view because never in its own history was able to develop its own view about visual art.... It is a literary culture, they are brilliant about literature, illustration, theater, concepts in general, this is the way they realize themselves as individuals, community, and the way they see what they call " the rest of the world". They do this very well. But not able to deal with the core of the expression itself. That is the reason they were never able to get even close of what Italians, Spanishs, Dutchs, Germans were able to produce.
Second - After the second war USA's Government had its biggest chance to definitely dominate the world and its own people politically, economically, military... and sure, culturally.
So comes the CIA making a huge propaganda in Venice biennial and all the art magazines of the world , and not exclusively art, as Times magazine, using as puppets these poor tortured artists that all they wanted was to be like the modernists in Paris. And Pollock was the main puppet . The big message was: " Europe is destroyed and anachronistic , they are dead old fashioned and dephased. America is the new deal, we are the real sophistication and future. Or you agree and admire us or you are wrong and will be expelled from the map". Well, abstract expressionism didn't turn very well, did it ? It pleased the Manhattan's elite very well and then what ? Pollock destroyed itself as knew that had created not a new form of expression but only a formula and now didn't know how to get rid of it, Kooning proved to be only a fool's court. All the others killed thenselves or were forgotten and today have absolute no relevance for artists that have any real search in their lives. Today still have this so dramatically and pathetic effort to present Rothko as a real genius, well, no doubt he was 100 better and deeper than Pollock, but really , if you are not an easily manipulated person by critics and art market, do you really care for his work, will you really leave your house, take any transportation and go to an art institution to only see his work? By the way, was worthshiped by institutions of his time and everyone that produces institutional art today has him as a god, what is extremely suspicious. And I say this because I like his work.
All this for what ? To destroy aesthetical values that anglicans were never , in more than one thousand of years , able to deal with and become the heads of this so called visual art world .
Still it was all too romantic, too European, these NY artists still used to struggle with their works and be tortured as Europeans and anyone with a real commitment with its own work used to do.
It had to be broken and nothing more convenient that take a extremely affected gay guy on speed that had the shallowest view of work ever and call him genius. They had Warhol now and the entire world was convinced that he should be worthshiped. Rauschenberg could take this place too but he had a problem, he was smart and his work was beyond than only pop. He didn't serve for cultural domination purposes.
This was the last punch, I mean, now they didn't have Cezane as a master, they had Goya and Bosh. In a so distorted way that nobody could recognize, now Goya was pop, it had plastic and glitter hiding its face, all packed in soup boxes.
During all this process parallel one thing that looked different but had the same nature was al the conceptual art, it sometimes looked like an natural extension of the boring , pretentious and fake isms of the first half of the 20th centurie, but no.... as a matter of fact it was what Anglicans were really good about. Literature. Visual art stopped to be visual and became a statement. Now The Queen Elizabeth's culture was really showing its plastic fangs. As mortal as real ones. Now they were putting in practice their real talent... to write and manipulate by words. To manipulate themselves first, then "the rest".
The Pop predictable botherance became Saatchi's Sensation and the Conceptual art , even Fluxus, became illustration named as art to be hanged on galleries and art fairs. Or to be ejoyed on Tumblr.
But I am not a victim only of this.
In Germany happened the biggest tragedy of the 20th century's world, and sadly I am not talking about Hitler but about Bauhaus.
Yes, it was a tragedy to me, the effort to transform design in a more mechanical and functional craft for intellectual stop to feel the useless assholes they always were and start to feel that were doing something practical to improve the society. It fucked everything up. Now the design wasn't made for humans and/or harmony of the environment anymore, it was an answer for a new world that demanded more practical solutions to solve problems of efficiency. Cold, soulless, ugly ( " it isn't ugly, is a new kind of beauty you must to get used to", it is said all the time since you were born to make you accept even before to learn to speak ).
Only a small pause on this all : I remember the first time I went to an exhibition with the proposal of "interactive art". I asked my self "for what ? Is there anything more interactive then life? " But we are not allowed to have life, are we ? The exhibition was the most boring video game a retarted kid could play. I am not retarded, I will not acept they to impose this to me as it was smart , interesting or had a real meaning. I will not acept as these people do.
Why do I put myself as a victim of it all? No way I am not feeling sorry for myself, how americans call this ?" self-loathing" or something like that, no I am not used to this expression.
Now can I explain better my work? I don't think so, not yet.
When I started to have any intention to produce art I was 20 years old. Because my life at the time was totally based on my own interest by self, psychology, spiritism, Christianism.... but even going to college to study psychology I didn't want to develop anything on the field of the logic even writing so much about this between 1996 and 1999. So in 1995 I created the Aterces Adiv Concept that, in a extremely short way, is the idea that nothing personal can be hidden from its own individuals in its mind and life and art must to be an extension of existence expressing the individual's nature with its all plenitude to be consider as a real form of expression.
So there was me , young and naive thinking that art is a really great thing. Worse, thinking that what recent artists had created was true, sincere and good.
As any young or immature person I was convinsed to think Francis Bacon was a great painter and artist, I only saw his works by books as here in Sao Paulo we don't have it in public collections. I went to one exhibition that had his works , something like 8 large pieces of him. He totally fall in front of my eyes, I had never been so disappointed in my entire life, it was shallow and illustrative about everything, it was boring and predictable, it was.... well... not even ugly, only mediocre and I started for the first time to suspect someone had told a big lie to me about art. Sincerely I didn't put all the blame on the artist, he deserves, but I totally put the blame on the exhibition's curator with his long and stupid statement, I put the blame on the curator that had written the book I saw of Bacon's work. I realized that knew more what people used to say about his work than the work tiself. It made me furious. Bacon was absolute not different than any Disney cartoon and I almost fell on this trap as the rest of the world had to.
This was the day all the contemporary and modern art fell in front of me and was never able to get up again.
For irony, on the same exhibition had a room with lots of Warhols, you know what they say, the painting isn't good but the concept is brilliant. I thought the opposite, I really liked, not LIKED , but thought the paint in one or other work was good and pretty, but the concept and subjects made me feel like to sleep.
In some level I started to realize that contemporary art wouldn't be able to feed me or fit my necessities. I still didn't know very well why, it was all based on observation ant not by ideas.
Modern art of the first half of 20th centure suddenly started to get as shallow as everything made on the more recent decades. So where should I turn my head to ? An artist must to have some references to start from somewhere. All this was very intuitive, I didn't have so much conscience of all this, only in some level as I had very immature opinions of rage and was discontent about everything. I used to see all the exhibitions in the city and go to all museum and libraries, at the time didn't have internet, but for some reason the distant and provincial Sao Paulo was very complete and well informed, the urge Brazilians have to be up to date with all the trends from NY and Europe following it religiously made the city to explode of new aesthetical values all the time, I remember when I went to live in London, 2006, 2007, all I saw at the art galleries and art institutions I had already seen in Sao Paulo on the late 90's, not that Sao Paulo is ahead of everything, but it is because this last decade was really lame about every single aspect of the human creation. ...
So there was me looking to everything and not finding nothing. I was experimenting all the kinds of medias, even digital, as form of expression. I refused to paint because, who wants to paint in the late 20th century and early 21 ? Not me, that was for sure. Even painting being my biggest pleasure when I was visiting exhibitions.
But it wasn't only art..... I was extremely unhappy with all I saw , life was really hard and having eyes almost didn't help to make it easier, the city was a complicated and congested dirt block of concrete where all was projected and built for corporative interests, and very personal interests too, nothing, absolute nothing in the city was in aesthetical harmony, and as consequence nothing works. People in Sao Paulo leave their houses in closed condominiums by car, and by car go to their private offices, private malls for shopping....everything is private with conditioned air, what seems very convenient but made all then arrested by security systems and member's cards. The city is horrible, if you spent one single afternoon out of the city, when you come back in the evening you already get unused to its look and even by the window's car all you see gives you cramps and makes you feel like to puke... it isn't an expression. But Sao Paulo's citizens found a way to defend themselves from the heavy ugliness that nobody, not even born and raised here is never able to get used to.... they built large tall walls, they drive cars with dark glasses by all the sides and don't open the window, their houses don't have any landscape to be seen by the windows , from the window you only see ... walls.
I was born very privileged, and grew up only knowing my private school, my private country club, my private condominium, my beautiful isolated ( as an island ) neighborhood, my isolated house with large garden and swimming pool with an ultra contemporary architecture and exotic rounded very large windows where you had as view the trees of the garden and sure the wall few meters from it. Uff, I was blessed, it was what my parents used to say to me all the time I looked by the window's car and saw people starving on the street, on those dirt concrete narrow sidewalks made for no pedestrian as it is a car's city, in front of the buildings of the multi-national companies and its large abstract sculptures in front taking the few space of the sidewalk do not allowing to poor people pass by in front of it. " Get distant poor, people in general, only cars can pass by here, this place is made for large metal and concrete sculptures, not for you".
Well, I was a blessed privileged children but felt excluded from the world as everybody else. So it all was always very agressive to me anyway. Maybe worse, because I was raised indoors it gave me real fear to go outside and see the world as it is, all I heard about the other side of the walls, is that there only exited murderers, rapists, disasters, all the kinds of crimes and evil..... Incredible how to protect you from the world, the same world destroys your self esteem : " you wouldn't survive there, that is for sure, it is a very tough world, you are better here ""among it all"", now go to play tennis ". " It all" they referred to as a protected paradise was the apparent concrete constructions of contemporary architecture with large abstract painting on the walls and even larger abstract metal sculptures at the gardens with modernist design. Bauhaus even for the riches. Oh yeah, my family wasn't rich, we were middle class , but in Sao Paulo to survive and have at least an illusion of life quality you must to live as the rich of other countries do. Today I think it was pure bulling. Not that I am ungrateful , I do think it was offered the best of the today's world could give me, the best...... and here the best becomes sad and revolting, a real hopeless despair. One of the greatest reasons people are so much on drugs and alcoholism and unstoppable sexuality. If this life style is the best the sophisticated world can offer and I don't get any satisfaction or real happiness, what should I expect from life ? "
So life became so over protective and frustrating that killed life, and art, as consequence, became so over protective, self explanatory that killed expression, and art.
And there was me. Living a meaningless educational system that never teaches anything only imposes values, living a meaningless life of swimming classes, karate and tennis matches, being extremely lost, unhappy unsatisfied, lonely and having all the adults pointing to the people starving on the street and saying I was blessed and the luckiest kid of the world, making me believe all the money around me was a force field bigger than religion. " They have faith and God makes then starve in the street, they don't read or write, but you have money, so now go to swim in this beautiful place and never make questions again". Fair enough, right? Yes, why not, I didn't know the world outside. World outside meant crimes in Sao Paulo or the paradisiac beaches we used to go on weekends, too far to the poor never discover and arrive. So yes, I didn't feel beauty in human crafts but I believed it was the best. That grey concrete architecture with large class windows ( with view to gardens and walls ) and large paintings were all I knew.
But a miracle happened, a new door opened in my life. My father that spent his life working on stock market and latter on City Bank got broken, then divorced my mother... suddenly I was a poor teenager, still living in the same ultra sophisticated contemporary house with my mother, but with no money to take a bus. I was sent to a public school with all the miserable ignorant, ugly, non-white, dangerous people. I lost all my old friends as I couldn't afford the life they had , as teenagers all then had cars, motorcycles, and weekends on beach houses with no parents around. I could buy one Ramones album every three months and should feel satisfied. I was on drugs and alcoholic, getting stoned and drunk everyday before noon.
Why was it good ?It wans't, but I could for the first time see the world, or Sao Paulo as it was. It was really ugly... oh, Sao Paulo really doesn't put a welcome doormat on its porch even because it hasn't a porch. If I was telling how meaningless were all the aesthetical values of my life, now at this period of my life I received a huge punch of ugliness in my face, impossible to figure out or heal. At least I discovered that poor people aren't criminals but hard workers. Starting by the school I went to study, imagine the ugliest American or English public school you saw in your life. They are a dream comparing with it here, the archteture is made for thief do not get in and students do not get out, it is identical the presidios, not the first world presidios, but the third world ones... and guess what? It is Pure Bauhaus !!!! hahaha, Not kidding. The level of depression of the kids inside and frustration is so big that it is even impossible to breath, you can cut the gray air with a knife, what isn't hard to find. Everything is practical and functional, all the design, but nothing works, because is a design all made to serve the institution, not the students.
Then comes the art teacher, as the literature teacher, the History teacher, Geography teacher about this they weren't different of the private school, since kinder garden they are like a one key's piano showing how modernists painters, writers and contemporary sculptors are genial and everything that happened till the end of 19th Century is a total useless European lie for hypocrites. Why? Because it is old fashioned, they say. Incredible , I spent my entire life in school learning all about European and North American modernism and a little bit of post modernism too, but never was showed me anything from other centuries, at least I really don't remember, I remember teachers saying about "old art", saying it was all archaic and useless. Useless ? Should be used for what ? And what they consider good, was useful for what ? For the lives we were having ? What exactly were they preaching about... these poor teachers that failled about everything in their lives and went to teach in public school, what values were they defending blindly so faithfully, what had all the modernist mentality done for then ? I guess... none.
What the old art and artists did to this people that they grew so much hate about?
I told all this to say that I live in a city built by modernist and contemporary values, my entire life was built under this. I was made to believe it was all right and convenient, the best option the civilization could adopt.
What did it make for me or my life ? Self destruction ? Unhappiness? No direction ?
Then comes the current academic ( digital instalations and all new medias plus current painting are the pinnacle of academic values and mentality ) artist's speech from EU and USA: empty, destructive, atheist, grotesque, leading to nothing.
If I was from their countries maybe I would adopt and shake this flag gladly, probably I would had being a bothered middle class kid living in a lovely place with trees on the streets and going to a pretty suburban high school complain that my parents are horrible because I didn't win the last version of mac for birthday... then later would go to NY study art and get fascinated by all that convenient crap that needs to be expensive to convince itself that has any real value. ( wait, but wasn't this the life I had in Sao Paulo? )
But I am from a place where never has offered me any kind of designed beauty. And the natural beauty was all destroyed. I was among the richest and among the poor. I was at the best places and the worse. All I saw was contemporary design-art and it made my life miserable.
Can you believe I started to paint ? Painting !!! After all my education about being modern at the New New World, Country and City and try new medias forgetting the old world and going towards the New Age because this is the right thing to do ? And for a moment I bought this idea and concept of life, world, and human being. It happens that after to have discovered painting I realized that it was the only media among all I've tried before that could really bring some level of satisfaction to my very personal need to express something interior. Wow, so the old fashioned world had a treasure this modern world tried to hide from me. Painting. Again, all the preachers of the "new media for a new world and new human" had lied and failed. Wasn't a surprise at the time the fact they lie and tried to put me apart from decency, truth and real expression, but was a surprise that painting, even do not being a pleasure during the process, could bring such wide and deep results. How could I guess? When did the world had showed me before it could be possible?
They didn't and don't want to see what I painted, but I showed to then , you bet I did. It isn't hidden. They turn their faces because of their shame, all they believed and defended is fake when faces my work.... the eyes on my paintings aren't romantic, they aren't looking to the void dreaming, they are staring the viewer and saying :" And what are you going to do about? I am here, try to deny me with your statements now".
There is nothing more subversive than to be in Sao Paulo and paint, this is the only real subversive art of the world today.
After to start to paint I saw books in hidden libraries of the city about "old European art"... wait. Is this the hypocrite mediocre art the teachers talked about? So inferior than modern art in general ?
I must to say I still get revolted. Why did the world had interest to hide Caravaggio from me but preferred to present the shallow Matisse as the most beautiful art of all times and Jasper Jonhs as the smartest thing ever ? Or I consider the whole civilization retarded and deadly mistaken or I think it is a horrible conspiracy theory in action. What would you choose ?
But forget, so here I am and all the places I look to are modern and not human at all. Made by human? Made by corporative mentality by citizens ( but not even for then ) that aren't aware of the fact being human isn't like this.
Not just that, all art I see , even the provincial Brazilian one imitating the Eropean or North American, is telling me that beauty is over, harmony is useless, truth is a joke, God is dead, life is in a can, all with very strong statements to prove it all.
I never had nothing, they , there at the first world , at their nice houses and lovely neighborhoods made recently the IMF force Brazil to land money for do not allow EU to break down so they are able to keep their life style all supported by government lies while people here in Brazil are starving in the street, brazilain people that don't have formal education, houses, nothing, but are convised buildings and stadiuns must to be bulit for the europeans and american turists that are coming for the olympic games and the footbal world cup. This poor ugly ignorant people that nobody cares is taught that what the Europeans and Americans are creating now is good, necessary and sophisticated so it must to be trusted and consumed. ( Incredible, Europeans go to street to protest about every little movement their government does, but when the money is taken from the poor people of the poor South American countries, the defenders of human rights get satisfied and shut up, they know the government will give money enough for their expensive wines, drugs and cheese, so... " let the not-white poor people of that distant continent die, take their money and only leave few alone to plant our holly cocaine ).
They kill people in poor countries to make grotesque/lazy/lame/shallow art and be considered genius worthing hundreds of millions of pounds. This is what they do.
Again, I never had nothing, so what do I do? I try to create an art that is sincere, and try to find some new kind of beauty for my life... not because I want a new kind of anything, I would be very happy with the old kind of art.... I try to find a new kind of beauty because I don't know to make nothing like the old masters. Simple like that. How can a man from the 21st century in Sao Paulo, the distant corner of the South America learn to built something pretty from others ? It is impossible, you must to create it from almost nothing. From the books you see, the yellow photos of old paintings, the memory of places you never went, the twisted references of beauty built many centuries ago in distant continents. Maybe I am the only one on this world creating towards truth and grace. It will never look the same, I have no idea of what I am doing or what is the look of the direction I am taking. But I know some things:
They denied me beauty, I make my own .
They denied me harmony, I make my own.
They denied dignity, I conquer my own .
They denied me truth, I search and find my own.
They denied me God. I am fundamentalist Christian and rub my Faith on their faces with no shame or fear.
I am Mein Welt, my own country. And with God's bless and His permanent hand on me I built my life, my world, my values... I won the whole world.
VICTORY : written in bad English , the language of the enemy as described on the Apocalypse book of the Bible, just to humiliate then all. Now you can try to murder me as you tried with my master and promised to do with me for my entire life, you loser ( loser: concept I learned watching American movies ), as Him I won life and death by God in the name of my lord Jesus Cristo. Eu ( primeira pessoa do singular submisso ao Cristo Senhor ) sou o supremo Kaiser von Mein Welt. Der Welter Konig is triumphant and eternal.
Mein Welt: grammatical joke the current Germans didn't understand till today, the denying of the German Republic, the Bauhaus, the 3rd Reich, the European Union. Everything created by the modern mentality. Makes me remember of the isolated German Christian communities in South America with their own dialects and preserved culture . The denying of the world as it was presented and forced to me.
Obrigado Senhor Jesus , meu querido mestre, por ter me dado essa vida incrivel e me dado condiçoes de vence-la.
