Interview with Marília Panitz Silveira

The artist from Rio de Janeiro would turn 100 years old in 2018. And to celebrate the date in style, the CCBB is holding an unmissable retrospective, which runs until 15 October, for those who want to know the universe of one of the most important painters, sculptors and tile artists in recent Brazilian history.

The exhibition "100 Years of Athos Bulcão" reveals more than 300 works divided into eight nuclei, which wander through the use of colours and poetry and emphasise his close relationship with figurative painting, graphic work and the costumes he made for theatre plays.

photo: Vicente de Mello

ANFACER interviewed Marília Panitz, curator, who signs the work with André Severo. Professor at the University of Brasília, Marília has already directed the Living Museum of Memória Candanga and the Art Museum of Brasília, and currently works as a researcher and coordinator of educational programs in exhibitions, besides being an art critic and independent curator.

André Severo, in turn, with his vast curriculum was, in 2012, alongside Luis Pérez-Oramas, curator of the XXX São Paulo Biennale - A iminência das poéticas and published the book Deriva de sentidos. In 2013, also with the same partner, he was responsible for curating the Brazilian representation at the 55th Venice Biennale.

Together they delved into a collection rich in references and full of possibilities. In the quick ping-pong that ANFACER held with the curator Marília Panitz, the curator reveals details and the backstage of the exhibition. Check it out!

ANFACER: The exhibition is very rich and presents practically an x-ray of the various skills of Athos Bulcão: from painting at the beginning of his career to the tiles that made him famous. What was the criterion for choosing the works for the exhibition when faced with so many possibilities and such a vast collection? I believe that there were plenty of reasons for dispersions and changes of direction during the process.

Marília Panitz: The idea of the curatorship, from the beginning of the process, was to give visibility to the scope of Athos' work, which is undoubtedly a well-known artist in Brasília. But what about in the country, how would it be, since the exhibition would be itinerant to other cities? Of course there's his work of integrating art and architecture, which became known for both quality and innovation, but especially in the use of the tile and for his partnerships - especially Oscar Niemeyer and João Filgueiras Lima, known as Lelé. But an artist with such a diverse and coherent body of work would need an exhibition that, starting from the known, would present other fields in which he experimented and the influence he exerted on younger artists who could understand his proposal. On the other hand we wanted, in a certain way, to "let Athos speak" and so we used as "score" for the exhibition, a great interview he gave, on his 80th birthday, to the journalist Carmen Morethzon: "The passenger of silence in Brasilia".

photo: Vicente de Mello

ANFACER: What fascinates you most about Bulcão's work? What moves and thrills you, taking into consideration that the artist's work is vast and shows Athos' versatility and restlessness in not concentrating on just one product. How do you evaluate this creative versatility?

Marília Panitz: I think that what enchants me the most is not a particular work, but the articulation that the artist made between the fields he explored. However, how to articulate his production of figurative painting, which in a certain way accompanies him throughout his life (from the carnivals at the beginning, to the photomontages and masks, to the drawings at the end of his life - new carnivals), to the rigorous abstraction, better known in his tiles and reliefs, also present in his paintings? By placing them in neighbourhoods, one begins to perceive the exercises in colour and composition that accompany him throughout his work. These create a vocabulary of the artist's own that migrates from one experience to another. This seems to me to point to the artist's stance already taken in times of real separations between languages and techniques. These clippings present us with an artist concerned with research and attentive to what is being produced. Perhaps, for me, the series of Masks (It is all fake) and photomontages (Black and White Dreams) have a somewhat different interest from the whole - although integrated to it, no doubt. Exhibited in two small rooms, they precisely call attention to a certain production that explores certain specific elements and that seem to reveal an interest of the artist in relation to the experiences that take place in the art world, which shows a permeability and, at the same time, a sense of "anthropophagic" heritage that assimilates and swallows influences, producing something new. Athos' versatility is indelibly linked to an investigative attitude and a real belief in the collective sense of aesthetic creation, which is no small thing for an artist trained under the aegis of modernism.

ANFACER: What are the criteria for mounting the exhibition? What is the most interesting path for visitors to have a real dimension of the importance of Athos Bulcão for the history of Brazilian art? What does the visitor need to be more aware of?

photo: Diego Bresani

Marília Panitz: We designed the exhibition in a joint curatorial and expographic work carried out by José Caetano Xavier de Albuquerque. The main idea was thought in the space of Brasília (from CCBB in Brasília, where the exhibition started and then went to other cities). Thus we had a sequence (not necessarily temporal) of Nuclei that explored, in a certain way, what was added to the artist's work over time. This, however, was punctuated by Athos' Acoustic Relief projects, a large collection, but little known, since they are produced for closed spaces. We recreated them in scale. Thus, we propose relationships that were confirmed throughout the research, as is the case of the first nucleus, A Cor da Fantasia (The Colour of Fantasy), which unites, in an idea of celebration as a non-ordinary moment in people's lives, the profane and sacred paintings of the artist, whose palette and composition have an incredible similarity (and we must remember that Athos was a practicing Catholic... and a carnival man by birth). The last nucleus Traces of Athos, where we place the conversation between the work of Athos and those of contemporary artists who recognize his influence, seems to be, in the assembly of Brasília, the way it was organized, the demonstration that the centenary of Athos points to many developments ahead. This, of course, implied a certain route that was minimally close to a retrospective proposal.

When we started working in the CCBB of Belo Horizonte, with its circular route (determined by the architecture of the building) and later in São Paulo with its verticalization and smaller spaces, we realized the possibility of other sequences of Nuclei, which we found interesting and quite logical for the visitor. Therefore the show does not demand a certain route, but suggests it, from the Nuclei marked by photos of the artist in action and passages of his speech. But it maintains its coherence and intelligibility if the visitor's choice is different.


ANFACER: After São Paulo, will the exhibition go to other cities? What is the itinerary?
Marília Panitz: The exhibition "100 Years of Athos Bulcão" started in Brasília, went through Belo Horizonte, is in São Paulo (until October 15) and the next stop is Rio de Janeiro, from November 6 to January 28, 2019.

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