Teresa Nazar: Freedom and Audacity in the Sixties

Teresa Nazar – Freedom and Audacity in the Sixties
“In life, there is no sense in clinging to things.
When you crave something new, you have to leave behind
everything that came before.”
Teresa Nazar
In different circumstances of her artistic career, Teresa Nazar closed down Brazilian Congress –, the imprisonment of students
always felt that art is a form of expansion of knowledge. Aware participating in the 3rd UNE congress, the prohibition of Brazilian
of the multiple temporal transformations, she used in her work in artists, selected to represent Brazil in the Fifth Paris Biennial, of
the Sixties, as a basic communication strategy , modern materials exhibiting their works in the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de
and techniques, making the understanding and intellectual acceptance
of the uncertainties and aspirations of society explicit and, student manifestations and strikes in Paris, the murder of pacifist
Janeiro, the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Prague Spring, the large
in some way, easier. This in contrast to the growing massification leader Martin Luther King and even the creative trespasses of the
after World War II, which absorbed the scientific and technological
advances, consuming these from a standpoint of lesser and stands, without subterfuges. The artist reformulates her work
Woodstock Festival). In short, a period that demanded taking clear
shortsighted interests. She understood, in an early stage, that radically, placing it in this new historical context, translating into
art, in the second half of the twentieth century, was not merely visual creations her social and aesthetic engagement.
to be used for personal expression of a more or less refined, but Objects pinched from daily life, industrialized objects, are
socially alienated, sensitivity – disconnected in time and from the appropriated as poetic re-signification matter. Robbed of their
personal difficulties of her fellow citizens. She thus preceded the original destination, without any type of glamour, they acquire a
precepts established in the main manifest of the Brazilian avantgarde,
drawn up and published in the city of Rio de Janeiro by Helio state of life, giving new significance to values.
new potency when migrating to art. They denounce the ephemeral
Oiticica, Rubens Gerchman, Lygia Pape, Mauricio Nogueira Lima The traditional standards of good taste, when applied at first
and, among others, Lygia Clark, in January 1967 and known as sight to the works of this phase of artist, are useless. Teresa Nazar
Declaration of the Basic Principles of the Brazilian Avant-Garde. deliberately incorporated and at the same time exceeded the artistic
characteristics of the then prevailing currents: New Dadaism,
For the artist, living and creating always were a stimulating
challenge, a relationship as a dialogue based on signs, forms and New Realism, New Figuration, Pop-Art. Just as Susan Sontag, Teresa
colors – to be experienced by the observers of her plastic creations. Nazar understood the significant contribution of Camp aesthetics
A dialogue that had as its main purpose mutual expression, not to that period. The painter decidedly eliminated whatever would
just a form of speaking for another or to another, but with the be easy to assimilate, substituting it by a vigorous composition
other – a manifestation as significant for the public as for the artist outside of the mainstream of the art of immediate perception
herself. A way of transposing the impersonality of social experience,
capable of awakening in the human being a self-consciousness, between painting and sculpture, a direct criticism of the industrial
and consecutive marketing, in search of an object-oriented art,
of building or rebuilding his values, of intensifying experiences, consumption society, which provided her with a particular world
of re-elaborating the world that surrounds him and on which he view, an indicator of artistic freedom attained by the boundless
acts, but also which pressures and models him.
imagination of this artist.
Teresa Nazar, in this way, understands the aesthetic and social Independent and free from sculptural objectives, the industrialized
materials chosen by artist drive and energize the final
configuration of the Sixties, a dynamic period exposed to technology
that evolves and revolutionizes day-to-day life – uniting feelings composition of her work: thin, flexible blades are cut, bent, folded
that interfere in the artists’ creative process and transcend the and pleated. Besides metals, Teresa Nazar added to her panels
merely private to project themselves aesthetically in the universe. plastic materials, different fabrics, nails and even screws
Thus, fragments and cuttings of industrialized materials become
essential tools for her plastic creation. A way to signal a difficult acquire a certain autonomy of an unexpected, uncommon appe-
Perfectly integrated into the composition, these materials
period not only for Brazil, her adopted homeland, but also for the arance. In spite of not opting for the use of materials considered
world in general. As in a vision, the painter understood facts that as noble or consecrated by plastic arts, her panels overcome vicissitudes
and attain unambiguous densities. The resolutely today are considered historical (Institutional Decree nr. 5 – which
visible
joints and stitches emphasize not only the precariousness of these
materials, but of humanity itself. The apparently contradictory
formal and figurative confrontations further reinforce the initial
proposal of artist: a direct confrontation with the troubled historic
moment of the period.
Exhibiting fragments and waste of the extolled technological
society, the artist carries out a differentiated aesthetic experience:
a criticism of the royal statute of contemporariness, which
privileges the technological productive processes in force, to the
detriment of humanity. Hence, the apparent instability created in
her works, the permanent tension between surfaces and volumes.
Congratulated by the main Brazilian art critics, Teresa Nazar
went still deeper into her aesthetic research. Mário Schenberg,
when writing about this new phase of the artist, stated “At the
Seventh Biennial Teresa caused a great surprise due to the very fast
progress she made in a short time. A real leap. Her painting gained
an unforeseeable boldness and freedom, thanks to her audacity
in the use of new materials and the turn to new forms of realism.
Her view of the world could not be properly transmitted through
the simple traditional graphic and coloristic representation.“ 1 In
1966, Frederico de Morais added: “Since a year ago, Teresa Nazar
transformed her thematic radically, starting a very interesting
series about space flight, in which she uses the most diverse materials
– metal plates, remains of industrialized objects, etc. – as if
to suggest the same ambience of interplanetary flight…. One must
pay attention to Teresa Nazar.” 2 Harry Laus also highlighted her
great artistic change: “Teresa Nazar abandoned painting on an
easel and now is dedicated to sawing, screwing, fixing the most
diverse elements to execute her paintings. She is a painter of the
São Paulo avant-garde.” 3 Antonio Bento, in 1966, agreed: “The pop
thematic suits the new productions of the artist…. Teresa Nazar
utilizes objects and metal plates, which revitalize her composition…
an innovative and non-conformist painting, based on a current
thematic, like space navigation with its rockets, capsules and astronauts,
modern heroes dedicated to the conquest of cosmos.” 4
Art historian José Roberto Teixeira Leite confirmed: “The artist
stood out through her pictorial interpretations of everyday life, as
well as her series of paintings dedicated to astronauts and space
flight, using here a language clearly influenced by American Pop.” 5
Though Teresa Nazar does not agree, many critics insert her
visual production in Pop-Art. The artist, in an interview for Jornal
do Brasil, disagreed: ”Since long – for need and obligation – I
stopped painting on an easel. I believe in the materials I search for
and use, because through them I manage to make real a piece of
time in which I existed.” Then she concluded: ”My art is very distinct
from what American Pop-arts show in their works, because, the
artist being a thermometer of his time, he will portray the symbols
that surround him within his geographical limits. The American
does not have time to stop and think. Therefore, American Pop-Art
reflects an agitated world, full of neon signs, food products and
Coca-Cola bottles.” 6
In an interview, the artist, iconoclastically, emphasizes her
aesthetic independence, affirming that the artistic nomenclatures
and classifications ought to be eliminated: “A time has come when
you need not say this is a painting, this a drawing, this an etching
or a sculpture. You can use all sculptural, graphic and pictorial
materials in one single work.” 7
In spite of the artist’s explicit disagreement of her association
with Pop-Art, some of her works (far from the marketing and the
apology of consumption) conceptually come near or are tangent
to this artistic current.
After having been acclaimed by critic Mário Schenberg as
“artist of the São Paulo avant-garde” and attain national visibility
through her highlighted participations in two São Paulo
International Biennials, the painter war invited to take part (in
the midst of the military dictatorship) , together with the most
important artists of that period –Helio Oiticica, Antonio Dias,
Rubens Gerchman, Nicolas Vlavianos, Pedro Ecosteguy, Maria
Helena Chartuni and Carlos Vergara - in one of the most polemic
events of the sixties: the Happening at Galeria Atrium / Avenida
São Luis in São Paulo,which according to Carlos Vergara was to
demythicize art: “We are realists. Things ought to be seen as they
are. Let us take the jacket off the work of art so the public feels
at ease watching it”. 8
In an interview to the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, Teresa
added: “The purpose of this happening is social and artistic, using
shock therapy to awaken in spectator the impact in the face of a
work of art … something momentary that may shock the milieu,
showing the meaninglessness of things and ideas, the disdain for
established values and something else, too: the validity of choosing
means of artistic expression.” 9
This event, an iconoclastic manifestation, was at the time
acclaimed and at the same time detested by the public and part
of the art critics. The critics more engaged in contemporary art
defended it. The director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo – MASP,
Pietro Maria Bardi, stated with insight and firmness: “Brazilian art
continues to develop as foreseen, always and ever more participating
intensely in the movements of renewal arising now, one
after the other and everywhere. For many this is wrong, for others,
fair… Everything that escapes from the field of easy and routine
comprehension is still not accepted.” 10
On appropriating and adapting to art objects and materials
till now culturally rejected, the painter formally instituted a new
reading, a new view. For this artist there were no noble or less
noble materials. It was solely up to the creator to review and
overcome standards and conventions stipulated by previous generations
of artists and/or art historians. Thus, mesh screens, steel
wool, fabrics, cut or bent metal plates, wood, gypsum mixed with
cotton waste and PVA glue, screws, light switches, electric wiring,
rivets – concave and convex objects – coexist formally in Teresa
Nazar’s compositions and visual allegories. Metaphors that shelter
objects, forms and vibrant colors: symbolic operations not tied to
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