Tunga

In June, Brazil's contemporary art world lost one of its most central figures: Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão, better known as Tunga. The artist had been battling cancer and passed away at the age of 64, leaving behind an important artistic legacy. Born in Pernambuco, Tunga chose to settle in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied architecture and urban planning. His career in the visual arts began in the 1970s, with drawings and sculptures of figurative images dealing with bold subject matter. In subsequent years, Tunga built a repertoire permeated by an expressive, personal symbolism. Performances, installations, bodies: his work, always marked by extreme conceptual complexity, touched on a variety of elements. I visited Tunga in his Rio de Janeiro studio in November of 2004, to do an interview for a Brazilian journal. He lived there, it was his home-studio, an ample building in the shape of a white cube, modernist in style, located at the foot of Gávea Rock and surrounded by the Atlantic forest. Tunga produced a complex body of work, challenged standard aesthetics, and combined different proposals rooted in the early Twentieth Century Avant Garde as well as in innovations of the 1970s and 1980s, and in contemporary art. But the true backbone of his poetics was the presence of discourse in the work itself. The way in which the artist molded his discourse was mainly the formulation of a fiction, built on the basis of fictive elements copied from the real, elements of reality inscribed in an imaginary context, or even self-referential elements present in many of his works. In our interview, Tunga presented himself as a character from his own fictions. To the very first question, which asked for biographical information, he offered the following answer: "To begin from the beginning already begins to interest me. Because any temporal realization that I put to your disposal dissolves the notion of a beginning. There is a notion of continuum in which the beginning can be found at any point, in any moment of production. It is a continuous salvaging of earlier or later works. This, then, is to characterize an idea of pastiche. The end of the idea of a beginning and perhaps the start of the notion of fronts of work, discoveries, open doors taking us to intersecting roads. The work is evidently a complex to which you have innumerable entries, some more populated, some more hermetic, so to speak. The work can take you to other works, references, so that the beginning could be Pernambuco or Rio de Janeiro. I often say that in these two places, in a single day, at the same hour, in the same location, perhaps by coincidence my mother of my mothers were twins. This may seem an absurd fiction, but it has the function of destructuring the notion of biography. In other words, perhaps I joined two mothers from two different places. This can be summarized more simply: it does not matter where you come from, but where you go."