Imaginaría, the most recent work by visual artist Vik Muniz (São Paulo, 1961), consists of large panels from the Repro Saints series, initially exhibited at the Cultural Space of Casa Santa Ignez Foundation in Gávea, Rio de Janeiro. In this São Paulo edition held in partnership with Kura, Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection and Nara Roesler Gallery, Vik Muniz’s imagetic creations revisit historical paintings belonging to the Christian tradition. In the detailed process of photomontage with tendencies in barroquism, the sacred work of art is the final result of the juxtaposition of several polychromic layers, signs and narratives. Rips, strips, and splinters reassemble fractional, fluid, spontaneous sacred figures, yet without losing a scholarly, aesthetic, beautiful, or religious rigor; a tasty appropriation of classic works revisited in the contemporary universe in line with the Baroque heritage in the Chapel collection – artist and collection make up a counterpoint of disparate elements accumulated over time and images, complementing each other, merging up. Baroque rhetoric engages the believer in a world of illusions, grabbing him by sight and sharpening his senses. Etymologically, the term baroque means an irregular, imperfect pearl. The term is suggestive because it brings us to something valuable and deformed, and this is what the artistic and literary school has suggested: to fuse contradictory elements, respecting the Renaissance ideals of pleasure, value of reason and beauty, integrating them to a spirituality of medieval joy, highlighting the transient character of existence. Art of contrasts, the detail joins the grandiose, religious subjects are blended with political and human thoughts. The urge to enjoy life bows before the ephemeral character of existence. The baroque will thus come to extreme formulations: the beautiful and the grotesque, exorbitance and restraint, light and dark, delusions and fantasies, ostentation, ecstasy, duplication, ellipse and movement – ambiguities and allegories intensely lived by men in that age, immersed as they were in despair, an outcome of the psychological concerns of that time.

Themes borrowed from baroque repertoires are recurrent in contemporary works, synthesized in investigations of memory, accumulation and image. Both in CIJY’s colonial art collection as in Vik Muniz’s sacred art, their coordinates of language were developed through equivalent expressive categories, although presenting distinct plastic materials: the sensory, the visual, the persuasive, the playful, the complex or the circulation of prints constitute essential common lines in the propaganda and the assimilation of baroque soul; convergence point, inflection and dialogue.
The timelessness of the baroque in colonial culture, in modernism, or in the contemporary works of Vik Muniz invites us to move closer and farther, like a bait in a game of stalking and seduction. Unlike situations where the need for a synthesis or interpretation requires the observer to complete the meaning of the work, in the case of barroquisms everything presents itself in an excessive trap of fantasies: there is a perverse taste for deception, what is plane seems to have volume and the volume is only shadow, wood or paper mimicking fake marble, torn sheets seemingly unconnected and turned into faces, objects, clothing, and landscapes; It is the joy of deceiving the observer, from simple witness to faithful accomplice.

The Crucifixion (from Thomas Eakins, 1880), Saint James the Greater (from Guido Reni, 1638), Saint Agnes (from Simon Vouet, 1626), Mary Magdalene (from Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, c. 1535 -40), St. George and the Dragon (from Gustave Moreau, 1869), St. Peter (from Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, 18th Century), St. Augustine (from Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645-50), Saint Luzia, Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Benedict. Madonnas, martyrs, pious men, doctors, warriors, and church patriarchs populate the pantheon of sacred works of art recreated by Vik Muniz and installed in the vaults, walls, and altars of the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection Chapel; fragmented memories, dialectic between past and modernity overflow in a reinvented Baroque.

Vik Muniz, one of the most renowned Brazilian artists abroad, has established a new visual language from trivial materials, but reconsidered in unusual and striking clippings: sculpted images with earthworks (geoglyphs), made from projections, huge piles of scrap, sugar, garbage, chocolate syrup, fruits, dried vegetation or demolition debris. The association of painting, sculpture, recycling, social work, video, collective and photography intertwine the author’s aesthetic research, but of fluent understanding for the observers. The accumulation of objects, the immeasurable complexity of tiny specks of organic matter, grains of sand, textiles, paper, or almost countless overlapping particles to form faces of personalities and saints constitute neo-Baroque sentiments that enhance references to missing traditions by exposing them under fresh breath. Vik Muniz’s work eventually yielded to a sweeping seduction of curves and countercurves.

Sobre o artista
Vik Muniz (São Paulo, 1961). Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and New York. Recent solo shows include: Vik Muniz, at The Sarasota Museum of Art (SMOA), Ringling College of Art and Design (2019), in Sarasota, USA; Imaginária, at Solar do Unhão, Museu de Arte Moderna de Salvador (MAM-BA) (2019), in Salvador, Brazil; Vik Muniz: Verso, at Belvedere Museum Vienna (2018), in Vienna, Áustria; Afterglow – Pictures of Ruins, at Palazzo Cini (2017), in Venice, Italy. He has featured in several biennials, such as the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); 24th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1998); among others. Recent group shows include: Naar Van Gogh, at Vincent van GoghHuis (2018), in Zundert, The Netherlands; Troposphere – Chinese and Brazilian Contemporary Art, at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum (2017), in Beijing, China; Look at Me!: Portraits and Other Fictions from the ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection, at Pera Museum (2017), in Istanbul, Turkey; Botticelli Reimagined, at Victoria & Albert Museum (2016), in London, UK. His works are included in the collections of: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; The Tate Gallery, London, UK; among others.