The Best Booths at São Paulo’s SP-Arte, From Modernist Masterpieces to Sly Subversions

Bruno Faria at Galeria Marilia Razuk

One of the most provocative works on view at SP-Arte comes courtesy of Recife-based artist Bruno Faria. Each of Faria’s bodies of work starts with a collection of sorts. For this piece, titled Introduçáo à História do Brasil (Introduction to the History of Brazil), it started with a collection of coins from across Brazil’s history. Of the 52 produced in this series of coins, only one, depicting the Baron of Rio Branco (José Paranhos, Jr.), is still in circulation.

On its surface, Introduçáo seems like a relatively straightforward work: the coins are affixed to pieces of light wood and are then branded with the figure’s name, their birth and death years, and a brief description of who they are. But Faria has smartly collaborated with younger people in writing these people’s biographies from a contemporary perspective.

For example, Pedro Álvares Cabral (ca. 1467–ca. 1520), the Portuguese explorer who is credited with “discovering” Brazil, is immediately identified as an “invasor” (invader) who has long been “considered a symbol of patriotism” when he “is, in fact, a symbol of violence.” His arrival is generally used to “mark the Beginning of the History of Brazil — as if nothing had happened before his arrival,” the text continues. At a time when histories, both within art and more broadly, are being rewritten, uncovered, contextualized, expanded, and split open, this work cannot be timelier.

Vivian Caccuri at Millan

Another artist who looks at Brazil’s colonial history is Vivian Caccuri. On one wall of Millan’s booth is a large-scale mosquito net that Caccuri painted over using delicate shades of pink and orange. To this work, titled Mosquito Shrine V (2022), the artist has added various strands of thread in the shape of stereos from which sound waves seem to emanate. Below hang wind-chime link implements that activate the work like a musical instrument. Caccuri’s use of the mosquito note, however, is important, as it’s meant to symbolize how the Portuguese brought mosquitos to Brazil. When activated, the work is meant to mimic the sound of them.

Montez Magno at Marco Zero

The fair’s ground floor has several booths dedicated to major Brazilian artists from the 20th century, both ones well known outside their home countries and ones whose following is mainly concentrated locally. Among that latter group is Montez Magno, an artist and poet from Recife, whose work takes over the booth of that city’s Marco Zero gallery. Shown here are works from across his career, beginning in the late 1950s and highlighting the artist’s wide-ranging experiments in abstraction. Of particular note are examples from his series “Barracas do Nordeste” (Tents of the Northeast) that feature brilliant, vibrant geometric shapes meant to represent the parks and open markets of Brazil’s northeast. These are paired with his own conceptual renderings of architectural buildings, like a pared-down Gothic cathedral, as seen above.

Décio Noviello at Bernice Arvani

São Paulo dealer Bernice Arvani has long been a supporter of Décio Noviello, an artist from Minas Gerais now in his 90s. The works on view here were made during Brazil’s dictatorship and are a sharp departure from the Brazilian modernists of the decades prior, as well as a break with the kind of art that would have been deemed acceptable under the dictatorship, as depictions of nudity and dancing were forbidden. Though Noviello’s canvases from the late ’60s feel Pop-inflected, Arvani said that because the artist lived in such a small town, he was unaware of that movement. There’s something absolutely sumptuous and fresh about these vibrant canvases.

Mario Arroyo at Galería Sur

Uruguay’s Galería Sue has brought three beguiling canvases by own of their country’s most important artists, Mario Arroyo. Working in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Arroyo created his own version of Latin American Surrealism that is indebted to its forebears from earlier in the 20th century. Still, Arroyo’s take on that movement is also something entirely his own. The canvases here, in which a pair of legs dangle from a piano or women poke their torsos out from train windows, have an air of mystery that leaving you wanting to see more and more by this artist.

Guillermo Garcia Cruz at Zielinsky

Upstairs, tucked away in Zielinsky’s booth, Uruguayan artist Guillermo Garcia Cruz is directly responding to the larger history of Latin American abstraction (which is briefly surveyed in the fair’s downstairs area). Garcia Cruz, who was on hand at the VIP preview, said that his art, in which hard-edge abstraction seems to glitch and pixelate, like a computer error run amok, reflects on how we experience images today. On view here are a pair of canvases in blocks of red, green, and blue (RGB, the primary software color mode for images) that jut out, as well as similar ones in black. The black ones are particularly interesting, as they juxtapose four different painting applications—glossy, matte, flat, texture—as a further means to complicate the artist’s version of abstraction.

Madalena Santos Reinbolt at Estaçao

Madalena Santos Reinbolt, who died in 1977, is among Brazil’s most important and influential artists, having recently been the subject of a retrospective at the Museu de arte de São Paulo (MASP) as part of the museum’s “Histórias brasileiras” (Brazilian Histories) exhibition series. Though that exhibition closed at the end of February, São Paulo’s Estaçao gallery, which has worked with the artist’s estate for over 40 years, has on offer two works that were included in the exhibition. These are exceptional embroidered paintings in which Black Brazilians are shown joyfully gathering and in which animals fill the countryside.

Jonathas de Andrade at Nara Roesler

A knockout booth from Nara Roesler exemplifies why the gallery is among the most important ones in Brazil. There are stunning works on view by Lucia Koch, Daniel Senise, Abraham Palatnik, Vik Muniz, Artur Lescher, and others, but it is a work by Jonathas de Andrade that really grabs your attention. The work is an in-your-face photograph of a foot smashing a piece of jackfruit. It’s a clever play on a Brazilian idiomatic expression (and the name of a telenovela): Pé na jaca. While it literally translates to “foot on a jackfruit,” it’s also a way of saying that one has drunk or eaten too much. That’s as apt a way as any to describe the feeling you experience after attending a fair week’s festivities.