33 Artists in 3 Acts (44 page)
Someone hands a red pen and a list of works to Orozco. Each sculpture is represented by a thumbnail shot and a description, which includes a mineralogist’s assessment of the material, such as “granite cobblestone.” The gallery’s registrar is currently on her knees with a clipboard and a measuring tape, calculating the size of the works. Orozco needs to commit to titles. “A title helps to round off the piece,” says the artist as he walks to the shelf on the left wall that bears about five works. He flips through the paper, finding the right picture, then writes “
Brain Stone
” in capital letters, holding his pen in the upside down way that left-handed people use to avoid smudging ink. He moves efficiently from one rock to the next, occasionally savoring the stone with his hands. He writes
“Fish/bird,
” “
Turbo Bone,
” then “
Infinite Car
v . . .
” which he crosses out and replaces with “
Cyclical Drop.
”
Manzutto joins us with my girlfriend, Jessica Silverman, who owns a gallery in San Francisco, to head out to lunch. “Did you ask him your favorite question?” says Jessica to me. I look at her blankly. I have absolutely no idea what that question might be. She turns to Orozco and inquires, “What is an artist?” Orozco looks at me affectionately, but in a way that also makes clear that I’m a pain in the ass. “I don’t give the answers. I am the one asking the questions!” he says jocularly. Orozco contemplates a work that he has just titled
Soccer Boulder
. It looks like a deflated ball—a humble talisman of a heroic past. “The border between art and craft is blurry. The decorative arts can be innovative and fine art can get into a system of repetitive production,” he explains. “There are moments when artists are artists and then they are not anymore. When they are not thinking, they become craftsmen of their own art.”
Beatriz Milhazes
Flowers and Trees
2012–13
“H
uman beings want something beautiful to live with. That is not a shallow desire. It affects our well-being,” says Beatriz Milhazes. She is driving past a colonnade of palm trees that lines the Jardim Botânico, which gives this Rio de Janeiro neighborhood its name. Milhazes is taking me to her studio. She has worked in the area since she attended Parque Lage, a stunning art school housed in an elegant Beaux-Arts building on the edge of the rainforest.
Milhazes parallel parks on a quiet street with nineteenth-century row houses on one side and a mid-twentieth-century community center on the other. “We have the feeling that the world doesn’t need artists because art doesn’t meet our basic needs to survive. But that’s not true,” she says, her hands still on the wheel. “Even the most primitive cultures have decorative art. They always needed to . . .” She takes off her gold-rimmed aviator shades and looks at me with her big black eyes, struggling to find the right words. “Aestheticize and exteriorize their thoughts and feelings.”
We pass five men playing cards at a table positioned between a couple of large trees that grow out of the sidewalk, then pause in front of a two-story house with shuttered arched windows. Milhazes rummages for her keys in a sizeable snakeskin handbag. She creaks open the right side of the French door to reveal a long room with a cement floor, an exposed
brick back wall, and high ceilings. The side walls display three colorful, unstretched paintings, which are abstract but suggestive of flowers. The first has a central daisy shape bounded by circles and stripes. The second is more tulip-like, with a throbbing, swollen center surrounded by geometric leaves. The third is a hybrid of the other two, disrupted by swirling arabesques. Milhazes makes her works upstairs, then hangs them down here until she is ready to let them go. If these pass muster, they will be shown at Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo later this year.
“I don’t want easy beauty,” she says, studying the works. “I want conflict. I want intensity, strong dialoguing, challenging eye movement.” Milhazes’s work is both riotously baroque and rigorously structured. One’s eye bounces around her paintings like a pinball kept in continuous motion by an accomplished player. “Collectors find that my paintings are hard to hang in their homes. When they install one, they realize they have to take everything else out of the room!” she says with a fragment of a giggle, adding that her works are also a challenge for curators hanging group shows. As Milhazes sees it, her paintings have the splendor of “an elephant rather than a nice lady.”
Pinned on a bulletin board full of gallery invitations is a flyer for a show by Bridget Riley, a senior British painter, featuring a vertiginous arrangement of curvy black-and-white stripes. “Riley is a great painter,” says Milhazes. “I am interested in optical reactions and possibilities, so Riley, and Op art in general, is important to me.” Marcel Duchamp asserted that conceptual art was superior to what he called “retinal art.” Milhazes is familiar with the argument and shrugs it off. “Duchamp abandoned painting . . . and painting
is
my subject,” she says in her warm, raspy voice. “I think all art is abstract. Sometimes my paintings refer to figurative things, but even my flowers are not so representational. They open the door for an eye experience.” Milhazes absent-mindedly checks the clasps of her gold hoop earrings, which are framed by a mane of frizzy ringlets. “I always wanted to work with painting because it’s a flat space that belongs to me—a space where I can develop my own private world.”
On a table below the bulletin board are some Havaiana flip-flops that display a detail from a painting by Tarsila do Amaral, a surrealist
whose work often addressed the tropical exuberance of Brazil. Milhazes considers her an important influence even though she cannot see a visual connection. “The freedom of carnival is strong in me,” she says. “I sometimes see my work as ‘conceptual carnivalesque.’”
Many of the artists from whom Milhazes derives motivation happen to be female, like Riley and Tarsila (as she is called), but also Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Elizabeth Murray. The daughter of an art history teacher, she also feels empowered by the canon of modernist Brazilian art history, which celebrates a handful of women artists such as Lygia Clark, Anita Malfatti, Lygia Pape, and Ione Saldanha.
Brazil is the only country in the world where the most expensive living artist is female. “I cannot afford to buy back my early work!” says Milhazes, whose paintings have commanded the highest prices for several years.
*
Elsewhere, women don’t even crack into the top twenty. I observe that the Mexican art scene appears to be a boy’s club and wonder what makes Brazil different. “Brazil is very Latin-macho,” says Milhazes, “but the big mix of cultures and nationalities means that sometimes things can happen in a more open way. Maybe the roles—or the rules—are more fluid.”
Milhazes picks up the left flip-flop, which depicts a naked figure sitting in the sun. She has nothing against estates that license the work of dead artists to keep their oeuvre alive, but she can’t bear the idea of becoming involved in this kind of marketing herself. “It is not my thing,” she says. “I want my work to be shown in places where the audience can see it a hundred percent. With mass-produced stuff, the quality goes down. I don’t want to do things that will make me feel sad.”
Avoiding mass-market projects is one way that Milhazes maintains her focus. “You cannot lose your relationship to the work. You need to be happy in the studio because if you lose that, you lose everything,” she explains as we climb a modern staircase with wooden slat steps and metal rails. The artist’s main workspace is a bright room where open
windows offer an angled view of
Christ, the Redeemer
(1931), the giant Art Deco statue that presides over Rio. Air conditioning would interfere with the way Milhazes likes her paint to dry, so stand-up fans dot the dark hardwood floor. Shelves and tables host thousands of tubes of acrylic paint, hundreds of brushes, thumbtacks, tweezers, a paint-splattered hammer, and a hair dryer.
Five works in progress hang in this room. Four of them are smaller pieces in their early stages. The largest, a six-foot-high by eight-foot-wide canvas, is almost finished. A strip of flimsy plastic sheeting covered in leaf shapes, adorned with royal blue and acid yellow wavy patterns, hangs down over a section of the canvas. Milhazes uses a collage technique in which she draws on transparent plastic, applies acrylic paint to the drawing, glues the dry paint to canvas and then peels away the plastic. I might be looking at the final layer of the painting; Milhazes is not sure. “This one is dangerous because if I glue it, it’s impossible to change. It’s over,” she explains. Milhazes developed this mode of making her work in the late 1980s while researching various printing processes, including monotyping. Under the window, in a series of piles that merge into one another, are the pieces of plastic upon which Milhazes paints. If she likes a drawing, she will paint it over and over again, using it on multiple paintings. “Some pieces of plastic have been with me for ten or twelve years,” she says. “They have their own memory of the process.”
Milhazes has long loathed the visible presence of expressive brushstrokes. “My work is very rational,” she explains. “I like a filter between my hand and the work. I like this shiny, bright, smooth surface.” The fact that Milhazes’s paintings borrow their texture from plastic is part of what makes them feel appropriate to our times. But often the transfer of paint onto the canvas is imperfect, leaving ghostly apparitions of the layer underneath. Although Milhazes describes herself as a “control person,” she is happily resigned to the fact that her method contains these elements of chance.
I sit down on the only comfortable chair in the room at Milhazes’s insistence, while the artist takes a hard stool. She lifts weights, so sits with effortless good posture. From about eight feet away, we examine
the canvas further. It uses a huge range of colors—pinks, blues, oranges, browns—with a more restrained assortment of shapes—circles, squares, semicircles created by the interaction of the two, along with straight and curvy stripes. The remarkably complex composition somehow maintains a dignified equilibrium. “I like very much this moment here. I don’t want to destroy it,” says Milhazes, pointing to twenty or so yellow concentric circles that are intermingling with a looser arrangement of multicolored rings. “And this is kind of special,” she says about a group of shapes that evoke globes floating in a sea of turquoise.
“I’ve been looking at this layer for almost a week and I cannot say yes or no,” says Milhazes. She stands and walks over to the painting and removes the plastic sheet that holds the blue and yellow leaflike forms. Now that it’s gone, I can see why it was there. Its pulsating pattern somehow brings the painting to life. I find it strangely distressing to look at the canvas without it. “Yes, maybe that is the solution,” she says.
Milhazes started making this painting over six months ago. “My process is slow because I need to think,” she explains. “Time is the key to everything.” Milhazes made eight paintings last year but didn’t finish them all because she was distracted by her retrospective shows in Rio and Buenos Aires, as well as various book, print, and collage projects. “Of course, I think about my paintings when I’m out of the studio, but I can’t make any serious, precise decisions,” she says, her right hand flowing from her forehead toward the canvas, demonstrating not so much her sightline as the direction of her mind’s eye. “If I am not concentrated, I will never arrive anywhere. I need to be here.”
Although she once felt the pressure to be more prolific, Milhazes now refuses to rush or be diverted from “what the work needs,” as she puts it. In the early 1990s, when she first started selling paintings, her dealer in São Paulo, the late Marcantonio Vilaça, requested works for art fairs, group shows, and specific collectors. Vilaça was, by all accounts, charismatic and persuasive. “I tried at first but then just stopped. I told him that I could
not
move this way,” she asserts. “I understood very fast that the pace of the market was not for me.” So resolute is Milhazes’s focus on the priorities of her work that she can’t imagine anyone would compromise their art for the market. With regard to Damien Hirst, she
says, “I don’t think he’s seduced by money. He’s playing with how to sell things, questioning what the values are, and testing how far he can go with that conceptual project.”
From her earliest days, Milhazes has had a disciplined work life. After leaving art school, she rented a studio building with nine other artists. “We were all in our early twenties. They used the studio to play music and meet friends. I never did,” she says, correcting her posture to sit upright on the brutal little stool. Milhazes is admirably grounded, a characteristic that seems to derive from her clear-minded subordination of her ego to her work. Nevertheless, I am unprepared for the prosaic modesty of her response when I ask, what kind of artist are you? “I tell my friends that I’m like a bank worker,” she says with a calm grin. “I come to the studio five days a week and do my job. I pay attention to detail and try not to make mistakes.”