artnexus #92

One certain characteristic of the work of Antonio Dias (Campina Grande, Brazil, 1944) is the impossibility to place him in a single artistic school or style. A multiplicity of experimentations both in terms of technique, materials, and spaces inhabited have been constant throughout a career spanning more than 50 years. 

Campina Grande, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Milano, New York, Nepal, Cologne, are all locations where the artist settled for more or less prolonged periods, and they allow us to trace a parallel between the diversity of technical resources deployed, the images populating his works, and the movement between such diverse geographical spaces. Dias’ poetics, sensuality, and political commitment force us to read his work from the standpoint of a number of complex components, as does his play with the unconscious. 

Starting with his unique 1960s approach to, and transformation of, the references of Brazilian constructivism of the previous decade and his very personal neo-figurativism, Dias brought forth not only a way of making at, but a way of thinking about his role in a society battered by the crisis of modernity and by the establishment of a dictatorial regime, revealing that the entirety of his vast oeuvre is based on lived experiences. 

Thus the importance that poetics has for him in the construction of an open, ambiguous body of work, difficult to anchor in a single interpretation, as he seeks for viewers no to stop with the initial emotion produced by what they observe, but to engage in a deeper reading of the elements that comprise his work. His work on our cover, Lingua Franca, verifies that need to experiment, not only in the materials used but also in his unique approach to the treatment of a primary unit, the rectangle, fragmented and re-presented from multiple perspectives. 

This way of conceiving and practicing art, confronting change as the motor of the creative process, drives the artist to assert that “I have a need to work in new things. Repetitive work, such as only making paintings, drives me crazy and leaves me unsatisfied. I am curious about different media and creating different perceptual situations”.* 

* Hans-Michael Herzog. “A conversation with Antonio Dias” In Antonio Dias. Anywhere Is My Land. Daros Hatje Cantz, Zurich 2010.

IVONNE PINI