​​To this day, very few people know that behind the high walls of one of São Paulo’s busiest streets, lies a mansion that houses an astonishing art collection –– both for its vastness and diversity. The Ivani and Jorge Yunes collection recalls the Museu de Tudo (Museum of Everything), a poetry book in which João Cabral de Melo Neto abandoned his passion for coherent monolithic structures to give way to his affection for the diverse. There are five centuries of paintings, books, ivories, tapestries, stones, porcelains, jewels, exquisite sets of African and Asian pieces, and a strong presence of Brazilian Baroque.

To demonstrate the strength of the past in our present day, Camila Yunes Guarita created Caixa de Pandora, a project dedicated to inviting contemporary artists to display their work in rooms filled with antiques, as if to awaken them from their venerable slumber.

The first invited artist could not have been more appropriate: Jorge Velloso Borges Leão Teixeira –– better known as Barrão. One of the leading figures in the 1980’s Brazilian art scene, the Rio de Janeiro native is one of the most important interpreters of our national culture. In contrast to modern artists who proposed a world based on coherent order, Barrão, who is also a musician, acknowledges that in a transnational age, there is an increasingly greater presence of bricolage, pastiche, sampling, copy/pasting, plagiarizing and other processes that scholars call intertextuality. That which we call culture is indeed a fragmented whole, comprised of scraps of civilization (habits, objects, perceptions, words) that penetrate and slowly take over our homes, clothing, food, playlists –– which mix Jay Z with “Jackson do Pandeiro” –– the streets of our city, where kebab food trucks park in front of upscale sushi restaurants.

Barrão’s empilhamentos (stackings), sculptures made of a wide range of fragments from objects with different origins, arranged and welded together––vaguely surreal, remotely pop and in any case, completely absurd pieces –– turn this artist into one of the most piercing critics of modern society, where forces in disarray coming from all directions entangle us, pulling us from side to side. In awe, being the magnets that we are, we react in a cannibalistic fashion, as anticipated by Oswald de Andrade: “I’m only interested in what is not mine. Man’s law. Anthropophagy’s law.” To paraphrase Oswald’s contemporary, Mario de Andrade, the father of Macunaima: “Hail Barrão, hero of our people.”

About the artist

Barrão (Rio de Janeiro, 1959). Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Painter, sculptor, multimedia artist. Self-taught, he began his artistic career with Grupo Seis Mãos, 1983-1991, formed with Ricardo Basbaum and Alexandre Dacosta. The group develops activities with video, live paintings, musical shows and performances and promotes the Improviso de Pintura e Música project in streets, public squares, colleges, etc. The first exhibition of the three artists took place in 1983, at Circo Voador, in Rio de Janeiro. This year, Barrão participates in the exhibitions Arte na Rua I and Pintura! Painting!, both in the same city. In 1984, he held his first solo show, Televisões, at Galeria Contemporânea, and participated in the collective Como Vai Você, Geração 80?, held at the Parque Lage Visual Arts School – EAV/Parque Lage, in Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro. He received the Brasília Prize for Plastic Arts, at the Brasília Museum of Art, in 1990. With Sandra Kogut, he directs the videos 7 Horas de Sono and A Geladeira. He also makes electronic vignettes for television, scenography works and album covers. In 1995, he created, in partnership with artist Luiz Zerbini, video and cinema editor Sérgio Mekler and music producer Chico Neves, the Chelpa Ferro group, which works with sculpture, technological installations and electronic music.