The affinities between the two artists, who use color masterfully in their paintings, encouraged the editors of CASA COR to propose an interview between them. The result was an informal conversation between the two greats of contemporary painting. See below. [galeria-abril id='27136' type='slider'] Gonçalo Ivo interviews Delson Uchôa:
Gonçalo Ivo: You are one of the rare artists who has a popular art style, but at the same time you are interested in the classics. Tell us a little about this meeting. Delson Uchôa: The created is directly linked to the complexity of the creator, and don't the extremes meet? I am interested in totality. The mark of popular art that may seem notorious to some is due to the presence of the soul of Brazil, that is, the enchantment of its people: I paint joy, magic, religion; I want a similarity of itself. It is in the hybrid, in the mixed race that I find this magma. Isn't Brazil the one that has been showing the world that mixing works? Back then, at the beginning of my work, looking at the geometry of amusement parks and the decorative painting of truck bodies and mudguards, I saw the geometry of Bauhaus and universal neoplasticism. From the fragments of this cultural collision my "self-identical" paintings are born, a speaking painting. The rhapsode that explains itself in itself. I am not fascinated by popular art, nor do I collect it.
GI: Tell us about the appropriation of Chinese umbrellas in your most recent works. DU: Chinese umbrellas, my latest artifice in the sense of expanding painting and taking it to the landscape within the surroundings of my birth. The umbrellas are the pigment with which I paint and contaminate nature with my art, I decode the natural landscape with intrusive pixels, that is: a landscape altered to my taste, transgenic; isn't the pixel the smallest point that forms an image? Well then, now I paint geography, and I'm interested in the image that this painting gives me. And the open-air painting also wants to talk about serious things, the pigment (colored Chinese umbrellas) is the result of the degrading and extremely polluting work of the Chinese industry. Can painting deal with geopolitics?
GI: Do you do projects, studies or go straight to work? DU: I like the immediacy, the snapshots, the action, the doing and the conversation that these moments give me. It is from them that reflection and concept emerge, the long and extreme conversation that I have in the direction of painting. I don't leave drafts, I don't leave residue, there is no trash.
GI: As a man from the Northeast, how do you see the landscape and culture of Alagoas today? What influences do you have on artists from this region, besides the popular ones? [galeria-abril id='27137' type='slider'] Delson Uchôa interviews Gonçalo Ivo: Delson Uchôa: The color palette of Gonçalo Ivo reflects the temperature of the poet from Alagoas, Ledo Ivo. I know of a well-regarded publication in this regard. Can you tell us about the coexistence, the complicity, between the poet and the painter? Gonçalo Ivo: After my mother's death, I had a great deal of contact with my father, the poet Lêdo Ivo. My first information about painting, literature, theater, etc., came at home, through my interactions with a wide range of artists with different styles, proposals and interests: João Cabral, Iberê Camargo, Manuel Bandeira, poets from the 1945 generation, such as José Paulo, Fernando Ferreira de Luanda, theater people like Nelson Rodrigues. I was still a boy, but I was deeply influenced by these people who interested me so much. That's where my closeness to this palette comes from, which is not only chromatic, but also emotional and humanistic. My mother was from Minas Gerais, and in the early 1960s we went to Mariana, Ouro Preto, Congonhas, Sabará, etc., and when I was just a few months old, my father took me to Maceió to see my grandfather, Floriano Ivo, who discovered that I had purple balls. You know what I'm talking about. Afterwards, there were countless trips to the Northeast to visit beloved uncles, aunts, cousins, and breathe the sea breeze and the smell of sugarcane fields. Delson Uchoa: The death of painting has been announced for a long time. Not long ago, the act of painting alone was considered non-contemporary, so how can you continue painting in 2015? Gonçalo Ivo: Painting is like breathing. You don't ask yourself how to do it because it is something immemorial, organic, natural to those who are from these parts. I have never worried about theories, dogmas, or diktats. Many critics and thinkers are unhappy, frustrated, and unloved people. We have the vibration of the sun on our side. Look at the vitality of your painting, the primitive energy it engenders in the public's feelings. And that is why you and I, different souls but sailing the same sea, will not sink, and as in mythology, we will always return to our island and pet our faithful dog. Delson Uchoa: Why Brazil and France? Gonçalo Ivo: My parents, Lêdo and Leda, lived in France right after the war. Great art has always been before me as a myth and a challenge. Brazil is me, it is you, Volpi, Varejão, Guerchman, Guignard, Beatriz, Pancetti, Batista da Costa, Baden Powell, Caetano, Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho, Villa Lobos, Goeldi, and many, many, many others. As Gilberto Gil would say in Parabolicamará, the world today is small. In Europe I see Croatian, Belgian, Portuguese, Chinese artists, etc., who add a lot to our aesthetic experience. Over the last ten years I have been getting closer to Spain, a fascinating parallel world that has given me reasons to move forward in my work. It is not Brazil and France, it is Brazil and the rest of the world. We will not give in to the trends or the conveniences of the art world, which today is a mediocre system that tries to standardize artists, their productions and proposals. Art is a testimony to the non-transferable personal experience of each artist, because each of us has our own voice, our own “timbre”, our own style, even when this voice is subtle and silent, immense like the work of Maria Leontina and Agnes Martin. SERVICE SIM Gallery - Alameda Presidente Taunay, 130 A – Batel – Curitiba - Tel.: (41) 3322-1818 Delson Uchôa Exhibition: October 1st to 31st, 2015 Simões de Assis Art Gallery - Alameda Dom Pedro II, 155 – Batel, Curitiba -Tel.: (41) 3232-2315 Gonçalo Ivo's Solo: October 1st to 31st, 2015
