Vinicius Gerheim | Brejo
A Gentil Carioca invites you to the opening of BREJO, solo exhibition by Vinicius Gerheim.
In the exhibition, biomes from Minas Gerais’ Caatinga, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest materialize ex-castrated bodies into new possibilities of freedom. The artist pulls from his memory, touching on patterns and repetitions of an autobiographical atmosphere. He permeates the past, visits art history and negotiates between figures and backgrounds.
-
Conversation between Vinícius Gerheim and Pablo León de la Barra, 2022
PLB: You were born in 1992 on the periphery of Juiz de Fora, in Minas Gerais state. I’d like you to tell me about your childhood, your family environment, the local context: about how it was for you to grow up there, about your memories of that time, about what you think has left a mark on you.
VG: I grew up in the São Pedro neighbourhood, in the western zone of Juiz de Fora, which nowadays may have expanded to such a degree of complexity that I don’t think the word ‘periphery’ can do justice to it anymore, because it started to urbanize after the Federal University of Juiz de Fora settled there. Current generations could also observe a change in the landscape and in the people who lived there or passed through there.
São Pedro started to be populated by my grandparents’ generation - when they arrived it still lacked a basic sewage system and electricity. The whole family lived on my grandmother’s plot of land, mothers and uncles lived in the back of grandpa Rafael’s bar. There was a well there. Grandma always used to kill chickens on the weekends, and the bar was once a butcher shop. We had a backyard with lots of plants, and we also maintained direct contact with the rural district of Torreões, where my family comes from and in part, to this day, still lives.
PLB: And when did you decide to devote yourself to art? Did you show talent since you were a child? Did anything or anyone have a strong effect on you so you could believe you could be an artist? When, how, and why did you move to Rio? Where did you study? Did any of your teachers influence you particularly? Who were your peers?
VG: My father worked in a print shop, so we always had lots of paper at home. I believe that may have stimulated me to draw non-stop from the age of seven, as most kids do.
I studied at Delfim Moreira elementary school my whole life, and in eighth grade they announced the open call for the SESC school in Rio de Janeiro. I applied, got a scholarship, and went to study there. I could finally have access to a programme and an infrastructure which stimulated me and made me believe that it was possible to pursue a career in art. It was a full-time school, we had classes all day long. So Rio became a possible, familiar territory, and I already made it halfway, the city had already become a geographically potential terrain for me.
Then I enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy (UFRJ) and fell in love. I saw a giant studio there, which was a former physical education court, where several courses shared the same space. I had the privilege of studying there during a period when there was support, such as partial scholarships, which enabled me to do a full-time practical course. I also studied at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts in the early years of the basic cycle course, and again the scholarship programme allowed me to not only to attend the classes, but also to get to know people who shared what they had and understood the hardship of developing an experimental language that was limited by scarce material resources. I had the chance to be in touch with teachers who always encouraged me - not only to approach my artistic career as work and a craft, but also as my own research which I could develop with sufficient closeness. I can look at my work and see a bit of every teacher I’ve had, and that reverberation always reminds me that I’m not painting alone, that I’m propelled forth by the many eyes and hands that have crossed my path and helped me to expand my perception in so many different ways. We always carry a bit of those who have contributed to the creation of our craft and our thinking.
Living in Rio, I had the fortune to share many places with other artists, from studios and houses to neighbourhoods - people such as Marcela Cantuária, Walla Capelobo, Lucas Lugarinho, Pedro Bento, and Gabriela González, with whom I constantly exchanged ideas and had conversations that were very sincere and very rich in references and themes. That has always contributed to the creation of a fertile field for practices that were free from official standards.
PLB: There is a museum in Juiz de Fora, called Mariano Procópio. I’ve been thinking for a long time about curating an exhibition of yours there. I’m curious to know whether you have ever visited it, and about what your art experience was like in Juiz de Fora, and how did that change when you came to Rio de Janeiro. Did you visit galleries and museums here in Rio? What was your experience of being directly in touch with art? Do you remember any work, artist, or show that impressed you in particular? Or are you already part of the generation whose first experiences with art came about through the internet?
After graduating in Rio de Janeiro, you worked as an assistant to artist Lúcia Laguna. I think that’s interesting, because she represents a bit this figure of the atypical artist - a woman from the periphery, recognized as an artist since adulthood. Other artists, such as Rafael Alonso and Jonatas Moreira, also worked as assistants of Lúcia. In some way her studio became a kind of graduate course for a lot of young artists. What did you do in the studio, and what did you learn from her? Did you work as an assistant to anyone else?
VG: During the whole time I lived in Juiz de Fora, the Mariano museum was closed for renovation, so I never had the opportunity to access its collection - only the park that surrounds the mansion. It’s interesting to think that during that whole period I lived near that space and never really entered it. My contact with cultural activities and art exhibitions in Juiz de Fora was related to institutions that deal with the preservation of memory: the radio museum, the museum of firefighting, and so on. It was only later on, when I was in high school in Rio de Janeiro, studying at the SESC school, that I could have access to a wider and more diverse array of cultural practices.
Before I was directly affected by artistic practices, I think I was also affected by environments which were not necessarily part of the art world. My family was very Christian and many of them worked in the parish. I grew up very close to a religious institution which, ironically, despite being a repressive environment, also allowed for practices of language treatment in my daily life; from the dramatic staging of biblical narratives to the decoration of the church for celebrations and rites.
My first experiences with art definitely came through the internet. The first artwork that entranced me was Portrait of Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix, which I saw on the internet. The painting has this crimson, vibrant atmosphere, and an androgynous figure with an exuberant and spider-like hand, dressed in a way that at the time made me think of Emo. In that moment I realized that images can have readings that branch out, that are independent from the time in which they are created, and that makes them eternally interesting. In this work, temporal categorization in terms of making, pictorial production, or of academic school is not fundamental, which makes the fictional pact with Portrait of Sylvia even easier. I think that’s what happened to me.
I worked with Lucia Laguna for two years, from 2019 to 2021. I believe that for any recent graduate it is a very rich experience, because it’s an opportunity to handle material and to experience an infrastructure and a production routine which a young artist doesn’t have easy access to. I think that, for me, it was like studying in the studio-body, coming into contact with processual strategies and with expectations.
PLB: The first time I visited you, almost two years ago, you had a studio at the Bhering factory - you showed me your older works from 2015 that I really loved, and only months later, when I actually saw them, I realized they were small gouaches, and not paintings, as I had imagined. The works are amazing, their colours are so vivid, and they portray an intimate, dream-like interior world, rather savage, tropical, and a bit surrealistic, or akin to magic realism. I remember telling you that something about them reminded me of Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). Could you tell me a bit about these works and why you didn’t continue in that direction?
VG: I already painted at the Fine Arts Academy while studying figures and backgrounds, and at the time I lacked semantic elements that weren’t the body or posing. Feeling this lack, I started to make gouaches as an exercise - as a kind of cataloguing of shapes that had marked my life and my memory.
This production was guided by the creation of a composition from right to left, and I made use of the material with which I happened to be dealing as much as I could, in this case gouache, using all the saturated shades in the richness of their pigments. At that time I felt precious towards the material and didn’t want to desaturate the pigment, so volume was not a problem. My interest was not in the field or in gravity, but in the configurations of shapes and temperatures.
Right now, I keep on revisiting those patterns that were part of my childhood and of a popular imagination which I shared. The size now allows for an interplay of weight and gravity that was impossible before, and the patterns move between landscape and still life.
PLB: Contrary to those little gouaches, the canvases you presented at A Gentil Carioca in August 2021 and which you are now presenting as part of your solo exhibition BREJO have come a long way in terms of size. Now they’re gigantic canvases, and white, male figures, rather androgynous or assexual, almost always appear. The figure could be you. They sometimes appear alone, but on other occasions they multiply, engaging in dialogue with themselves, looking at themselves with gestures of discovery and desire. At other times, they address the viewer, sometimes in a curious and seductive manner, sometimes defiantly.
In the canvases that came before this series, there was either no background at all, or there was only background. The works consisted at times of figures floating in a void, at other times of patterns inspired by fabric and clothing prints, without human figures. In your last exhibition at A Gentil Carioca, the human figures seemed to be in transition, seemed to wish to become vegetation or animals, sometimes chickens, fish, wild dogs, parrots, or they were feeding from a cow’s udder; in other cases, becoming banana-men, jabuticaba-men, or mango-men. In the BREJO works you now almost turn them into landscape - into sea, desert, flooded marsh - on the borderline of background and human figure, of someone being portrayed and the landscape that dissolves. There is also an excess of painting, especially oil, but also acrylic painting, as well as different painting techniques that seem to reference different moments in the history of painting. Could you talk a bit about that series of paintings, about how the transition towards them came to be, and in what direction you think they went?
VG: The body is our physical limit. We inhabit it, so we’re always negotiating with the atmosphere or environment that surrounds us. At the moment in which I started, in a certain way, to catalogue and collect spaces of freedom, I also started to search for motives, which presented themselves in an intersection of prints and patterns from the popular imagination and the history of painting. Many dish cloths are printed with the most typical still lifes composed of vases and fruits, many curtains and tiles simulate natural landscapes, and the canvas also inhabits this place between fabric and window. My old works reveal that negotiation between viewer and scene, the question of vigilance, the witnessing of someone being busted.
I believe that my work naturally veered towards human strategies of covering and uncovering, of protecting or hiding, decorating. When I think of the word ‘landscape’, the scenery that comes to mind is the image of nature. We’re always trying to fill up asseptical and inhospitable spaces with something that provokes freedom in us. As a homossexual, that is even more urgent to me. I learn a lot about the works while I make them, there is no project or final goal without the process. The greater desire is exactly trying to enjoy everything I’ve learned without wasting anything, and with the greatest possible potency. We live in a moment in which we consume images in the same scale and surface, on the screens of computers and cellphones. Maybe painting, to me, is able to enchant vision again, as well as the faith in the image through its hyper-surface and its play with scale, its potential to create memories, to capture sensations, and to be a source of knowledge. I’m very grateful to work with something so intimate and so scientific.
