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Saturday, January 05, 2002

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Brazil's really hot now. Not just its Celsius reading, but a large survey exhibition, "Body and Soul," at the Guggenheim Museum and a smaller exhibition of Brazilian fiber work at New York's El Museo del Barrio has eyes looking south.

"Brazil without Frontiers" at the Silver Eye Center for Photography, offers a close-to-home opportunity to enter the surge of excitement over this large, culturally diverse hemispheric neighbor.

The show's title refers to the locations -- remote regions along the country's western continental borders -- of the 40 black-and-white images taken by five Brazilian photographers. The exhibition was co-organized by the Houston Center for Photography and the National Foundation of Art/Funarte, Rio de Janeiro.

Silver Eye executive director Linda Benedict-Jones has long been interested in Brazil's culture. She and husband Christopher lived in Portugal for four years, and she speaks Portuguese, Brazil's dominant language. She reads Brazilian literature, listens to its music (being played in the gallery) and celebrated the country's 1994 World Cup win.

This exhibition particularly interested her, she says, because it doesn't focus on the coast, so it's "not the Brazil that people are expecting ... the Brazil of travel agency posters." She also thinks it's important that the photographs were taken by Brazilians, not foreigners shooting for publications like National Geographic.

"That we're looking at a culture through the eyes of those indigenous to the culture is not insignificant," she says. "There are subtleties that wouldn't be there if an outsider took the picture. It's not the exotic other -- these are countrymen. [The result] feels more genuine, and more introspective."

Photographers' images are mixed in the gallery, and the focus of the exhibition is on the countryside and the people represented. But after spending some time with the works, the visitor will be able to discern individual expression.

Of the five, Elza Lima stands out with attention-grabbing, often posed, tableaux that are all winners. In one, a boy awkwardly gripping a black lamb stares out from the foreground. Behind him, under a cloudy sky, other children and a group of cattle are arranged in a dream-like scenario on the flooded banks of a waterway.

While a contemporary aesthetic is evident throughout the exhibition, Lima pushes it by referencing fine art. A boy standing in the shade of river-edge vegetation recalls Greek statuary with his tight curls and evident physique, and a sand-covered child framed surrealistically by a fish and a hand with butterfly could be (but isn't) collage. Religion is culturally important in these areas, and surfaces in many of the show's photographs. Lima makes more oblique reference to its presence, as when incorporating symbols like the lamb or a figure leaning against a staff.

Rather than allow the children she photographs so well to become stereotyped, Lima makes them symbolic of their time and place; they celebrate their uniqueness, staring down the viewer who may be tempted to categorize them. The results are memorable.

She also has the most startling photograph in the show -- that of a woman skinning a monkey on a rough wooden pier while dark water laps at her feet. This image of primate preparing primate for consumption may make a few more converts to vegetarianism, but it's a reminder of extant cultural differences.

Antonio Augusto Fontes has masterful compositional integrity, his images arranged within geometric divisions. Four men sitting in front of a huge movie poster in a bar are as theatrically dashing as the stars pictured, two very different approaches to bridges will have extra meaning in our city and an elegant complement of curves -- railroad tracks, the shadow cast by a hillside and the rutted path an old man walks -- is graceful and compelling.

Celso Oliveira and Tiago Santana have also established, recognizable identities. The most noticeable characteristic of Oliveira's images is the cropping, so that parts of bodies -- a hand, the bottom of a face -- become the subject. He appears to invite the viewer to complete the picture, and the idea, as with one composition that pairs a close-up of an elderly man's face with his wedding photograph -- a stopped moment of memory -- which he grips. Santana captures the flavor of life with verve, as in a half-dozen little "angels" passing a thatched-roof house or a marketplace complete with crowds, a dog and a clock with a crucifixion face.

Ed Viggiani's images are at first the least intriguing, but that may be because his commentary is less obvious. The side of a shiny van with Japanese writing on its window slices into a photograph of a boy sitting on a crate near a tattered sun umbrella. A family portrait includes a mother reflected fully in a mirror that she holds, which blocks half of the father's face; only the son is seen straightforward and fully.

A lecture with a tantalizing title, "Cannibalism and Tropicalism in the Brazilian Artistic Identity," will be given at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15 by Leo Mendonca. He is a native of Brazil, professor in the department of photography at Susquehanna University, in Selinsgrove, Snyder County, and a Silver Eye member. Admission is $7, $4 for students and members.

Other complementary events include two 7 p.m. video screenings: Wednesday, "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands," "a heartwarming fantasy about love, life and Brazilian culture," and Jan. 30, "Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus)," the Greek myth "told against the madness of Carnival in Rio" (donations requested). At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 21, international economist Jay Brooks, retired from the World Bank, Washington, D.C., will lead a discussion about the exhibition. The 7:30 p.m. Cafe Silver Eye Jan. 17 will be led by City Paper photographer Heather Mull and Anne Medsger of the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health, and Feb. 7 by CMU professors Paul Eiss (anthropology and history) and John Soluri (history).

"Brazil" is at 1015 E. Carson St., South Side, through Feb. 23. The gallery is open noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and until 9 p.m. Thursday. John Fobes and Ruthanne Bauerle have a fine, small exhibition in the Members' Gallery. For information, call 412-431-1810 or visit http://www.silvereye.org/.

Court intrigue

Franklin Toker, University of Pittsburgh professor of the history of art, claims there's a heretofore unaddressed -- and provocative -- motivation behind a famous 17th-century Spanish painting. At noon Tuesday he'll present his argument in "An Untried Perspective on 'Las Meninas' by Velazquez: What Did the Queen (Fore)See?" The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be in Room 203 of the Frick Fine Arts Building.