Gravura Brasileira

Of Carbon and Ammonia

An exhibiition inspired by the Poem "Psychology of a Loser" by Brazilian poet Augusto dos Anjos

curated by Eduardo Besen

03/23/2021 - 05/21/2021

Gravura Brasileira Art Gallery

Monday / Friday  -  14 / 18h

From the origin of life to science and technology

From land and nature to creation and the "big bang"

From gesture to line

From matter to the ethereal

From inheritance to the passage of time

From symbolism to modernism

From the existential to the symbolic

Contemporary as transition and fluidity

From the existential bewilderment

Between existentialism and science and between the atom and the cosmos, Augusto dos Anjos wrote a violent and visceral poetry crossed by cosmic anguish and the memory of death. Man is finite and decomposes. Human existence is subject to biology and the decay of being. The grandiloquent style of the writing expresses this struggle between excess and agony.

This existential pain is connected with our time of pandemic and authoritarianism with no possibility of escape or exit. The end of existence: A rotting aesthetic.

Psychology of a loser

"I, son of carbon and ammonia,

Monster of darkness and shining,

I have suffered, since the epigenesis of childhood,

The bad influence of the signs of the zodiac.

Deeply hypochondriac,

This environment causes me disgust ...

A craving rises to my mouth analogous to craving

That escapes the mouth of a cardiac.

The worm - this worker from the ruins -

May the rotten blood of carnage

Eats, and life in general declares war,

Come look at my eyes to gnaw them,

And just leave my hair,

In the inorganic coldness of the earth! "

Augusto dos Anjos (1884-1914)

Artists

Adriana Moreno

Ana Kesselring

André Yassuda

Antonio Carvalho

Atelier Piratininga

Biba Rigo

Ernesto Bonato

Francisco Maringelli

Iberê Camargo

Jacqueline Aronis

Julia Goeldi

Lygia Eluf

Marco Buti

Norma Mobilon

Oswaldo Goeldi

Otávio Araújo

Paulo Camillo Penna

Regina Carmona

Ulysses Boscolo