MARIO CRAVO NETO – ESPÍRITOS SEM NOME
Mario Cravo Neto (1947–2009) was born in Salvador. He is the son of sculptor Mario Cravo Jr. and his main references were his father’s close friends: Carybé, Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, Lina Bo Bardi. Cravo Neto had sculpture in his dna and learned photography from two major modern photographers: Hans Mann and Fulvio Roiter. In 1969, married to Dane Eva Christensen, he went to New York to study at the Art Students League – a watershed in his life.
This exhibition is not structured in chronological order. It is rather built from an articulated set of series that highlights the development of Cravo Neto’s poetics and the plurality of his expressive interests. Focusing on photography, it attempts to show his poetic restlessness throughout four decades of intense creativity. Some drawings, films, books, scrapbooks and installations – as well as a set of documents – are relevant hallmarks in the broader scope of his photographic work.
Espíritos sem nome [Nameless Spirits] is the title of an unfinished book by Cravo Neto, and expresses his interest in unveiling the energy that gives life to the emergence of bodies and things. In Cravo Neto’s work, photography – as a tool to quickly register the world – is permeated by the subjectivity of one’s gaze. Therefore, it combines information and experience. The ensuing manipulation of the development and printing processes granted to Cravo Neto’s photography a unique freedom: talking about the world and simultaneously depicting it beyond mimetic norms. As a result, we see images being created in the space between similarity and dissimilarity.
After the period in New York, he came back to Brazil in late 1970. He took part in the 1971 and 1973 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo with sculptures, installations and photographs. Cravo Neto is a diverse artist who deals with strikingly modern dualities: nature and culture; construction and chance; light and shadow; austerity and outwardness. He had a generous gaze, capable of registering both the intimacy of a Danish atmosphere and the baroque heartbeat of Salvador. In 1975 he suffered a car accident that kept him in bed for almost a year. From that point on, photography became his main means of expression.
His work as a photographer reached maturity staring in the 1980’s. Two series can be highlighted as summaries of his photographic journey. First, the black and white studio portraits against an infinity cove made from a truck canvas tarpaulin. The title Eternal Now is a precise translation of what the spectator sees. It is all about artistic skill, astonishment, graveness and symbolism. After that came his large colored compositions, assembled in the book Laróyè. He became one of Brazil’s main contemporary artists to work with colors. Colors that were at once vibrant and restrained.
After these two series, the exhibition turns back to the experimental artist that focused both on Brazilian religiousness – from Aleijadinho’s prophets to the rituals of Candomblé – and on the minimalist depiction of a nest/still-life, with incursions into an installation made of calcined cameras and the remarkable photography-performance series with fire in the landscape. A final highlight is the film GW41 Persian Gulf, made in front of a TV set at the time of the Gulf War. This work reunites a group of references that have always followed Cravo Neto: his fascination for contrast, for fire, for struggle, for the tragic and poetic dimensions of human existence.
Luiz Camilo Osorio
_
Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) and Instituto Mario Cravo Neto (IMCN) present the exhibition Mario Cravo: Espíritos sem nome [Nameless Spirits], curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio.
This jointly conceived initiative started with a partnership agreement signed in 2015 between the two institutions, aimed at preserving the diffusion of Mario Cravo Neto’s work. The exhibition explores a broad collection of more than 100,000 photograms, currently preserved by IMS, and places it in direct conversation with the extensive collection of works produced and finalized by the artist himself, as well as with several documents covering different moments of his career, all gathered in the IMS collection.
Founded in 1992, Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) is one of the few institutions, even at the international level, focused on the preservation of complete collections of photographers – collections which encompass the full production of the authors and at the same time represent a comprehensive record of their artistic and professional trajectories. Founded in 2010, Instituto Mario Cravo Neto (IMCN) has the goal of promoting the legacy of this artist and photographer, covering a diversity of techniques, media and topics explored by Mario Cravo Neto throughout his life. Headquartered in the city of Salvador since 2017, IMCN fulfils its mission of preserving Cravo Neto’s memory, and also of fostering the diffusion of photography as an art form.
IMS and IMCN acknowledge everyone involved in the development and execution of this project and invite all visitors to observe in detail the artist’s broad and diverse body of work gathered in this exhibition, which places special focus on his intense research and creations in the field of photography.
Instituto Moreira Salles / Instituto Mario Cravo Neto