São Paulo, Brasil
29/03/2025 - 29/05/2025

IN ALTER DO CHÃO
Rhapsode from images
Mário Schenberg (1914-1990), physicist and art critic, highlighted the artist as one of the pioneers of the new figuration in Brazil, a dominant trend in the 1960s. At that time, José Roberto Aguilar painted with spray and spray gun (1965) and, as a result of this process, he developed gestural painting, with an agile workmanship and strong chromatic expression

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Aguilar always painted like a fighter. The clash between paint and canvas and gestural choreography are important actors in the construction of his visual poetics. That is, the artist develops a true melee with the canvas, in a rapid relationship between thought and action. It is enough to visit his studio to notice that, in these pictorial clashes, his ink strokes go far beyond the limits of the canvas

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Aguilar has always integrated literature and music into his visual expression. It is worth noting that the artist is himself a writer and musician. In his youth, he participated with Jorge Mautner and José Agripino de Paula (1937-2007), in the performative-literary group Kaos, which contained, in itself, the seeds for the emergence of the Tropicália movement (1968). In 1981, Aguilar released the book “The Divine Brazilian Comedy” and created the “Performance Band”, a counterculture musical group, in which Paulo Miklos and Arnaldo Antunes participated, among others

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The first recording (CD) in 1982, with the title Aguilar and the Performance Band, features nine songs, including “You Chose Your Superhero Wrong” (a collective song), which became a kind of counterculture anthem, and also the song “Strangeness”, by Arnaldo Antunes.

We notice in the artist’s painting the constant presence of musical gestures, of fabulation. Aguilar introduces concepts, words, texts, and letters to his work. The narrative often acquires an epic, heroic expression. Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003), who analyzed Aguilar’s work in depth, drew our attention to this poetic aspect of the artist: “Rhapsod is someone who weaves or gathers poems. Aguilar presents himself as a rapsode of images

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