São Paulo, Brasil
11/06/2018 - 14/07/2018

“Things in life happen by chance. I embark on them or I don’t,” the poet Ferreira Gullar once wrote. The reliefs, born of chance, inhabited a particular universe of the artist. The beauty and color of the works he created enchant the eye: there is a surprising contortionism of verse and reverse that emerges from the forms. These are the works that the public can check out in Relevos, an exhibition organized by Dan Galeria in partnership with UQ! Editions, between June 9 and July 14.

The show continues the launch of A Revelação do Avesso, a limited edition art book launched in 2014, in the same space, containing 60 reliefs, of three copies each, reproduced in steel and accompanied by a book with poems by Gullar himself. The edition sold out quickly. The author of the Neoconcreto Manifesto (1959), which launched the works of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, was 84 years old, in the fullness of vice and creative freshness. Now the paper originals of these 60 reliefs, never shown before, are presented for the first time.

Gullar’s relief collages were, in fact, born out of chance. According to the author himself, he had been doing them for some time. She had fun in the process of color choices and was surprised by the unexpected shapes that appeared while cutting the paper. On one day, he placed the cutouts on a drawing and then pasted them. The scene was interrupted by his cat, who abruptly slapped the sheets of paper, messing up the cutouts. “I glued them just as they were: it turned out that the drawing was the order and the colored cutouts, the disorder,” he wrote in the text of Revelação do Avesso.

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poet and critic, Gullar never stopped being an artist — in his own way, as he explains in the same text: “They convinced me, claiming that it didn’t matter whether or not I am a plastic artist; it mattered that the relief collages were beautiful and original. I became enthusiastic and I continued to produce these raised collages, which amuse me a lot. Whether they’re art or not matters little, since I don’t really want to be an artist.”

Launched by UQ! , editor of Leonel Kaz and Lucia Bertazzo, today’s edition is considered a rarity among collectors and art enthusiasts. “Gullar was ethical, aesthetic, poetic… and a lot of fun. It didn’t save anything, neither in integrity, nor in the gestures or words with which we expressed it. He said that ‘life isn’t enough’, so it needed to be reinvented every day. He also said that the creation came from an astonishment. And the enthusiasm he put into everything. These reliefs, born of enthusiasm and chance, are presented here as what they are: significant marks for the history of Brazilian art”, points out the editor.