The exhibition “Debret in question — contemporary looks”, open to the public on Tuesday (25), at the Ipiranga Museum, in São Paulo, presents a dialogue between a set of works from Brasil Império, by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret, and their reinterpretation by 20 contemporary artists, with new works by Rosana Paulino and Jaime Lauriano.
The exhibition is an offshoot of the book Rever Debret (Editora 34, 2023), by researcher Jacques Leenhardt, who is curated alongside Gabriela Longman. Organized in two parts, the exhibition displays 35 lithographic plates that are part of the book “Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil”, printed in Paris between 1834 and 1839.
The curator points out that Debret refuses the idyllic representation of the country at that time and assumes an almost anthropological stance, observing and describing everyday life in detail and with a critical stance. At the time, the curators say, the set was rejected by the Brazilian government for portraying violence in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Empire.
From 1816 to 1831, the artist followed the transformation of the Portuguese colony into the Brazilian empire. “How a nation is built is a fundamental theme of the book. [Tem] the central part about life in Rio de Janeiro, which is fundamentally a life with slaves. Debret always remembers this: Portuguese people don’t work, they don’t want to work, they don’t like work”, said curator Jacques Leenhardt.
“Those who work and are building the country are the slaves. That’s why the presence of the slave is so important in this book. There are slaves in all the books, all the ‘picturesque journeys’, but they are small [nos registros]are lost in the general landscape of the city or countryside. In Debret’s book, the slave is an important and central figure. When selecting these images, the importance of these people’s work can be seen”, he explained.
Reinterpretations
Contemporary reinterpretations mark the second part of the exhibition. They revisit Debret’s works to question the hegemonic narrative of history and dominant discourses, also presenting contemporary events considered a legacy of the enslavement of the black population. They are works by artists such as Gê Viana, Dalton Paula and Isabel Löfgren & Patricia Goùvea.
Among the works of these artists there is a variety of techniques. For curator Gabriela Longman, this is a reflection of the diversity of contemporary art. “There’s photography, video, installation, digital collage, painting, engraving. It’s a wide variety of media and languages, and also a variety of discursive tone, which for us is even more interesting,” he said.
According to the director of , Paulo Garcez Marins, the latest temporary exhibitions held at the museum have sought to interpret the past with the questions of the present.
“This is, after all, the characteristic of historical thinking, an intellectual and cognitive operation on the past. This is what we seek to do when approaching, through different paths, the forms of violence and resistance that shaped Brazil”, he explained.
Debret’s works were reproduced in textbooks read by different generations in the country. They were also featured in various publications, media and everyday objects, such as t-shirts and calendars, and at the opening of the soap opera “A Escrava Isaura” (TV Globo). As a result, the works ended up acquiring an existence without any relationship with the context and conditions in which they were produced.
“With the decontextualization of the images in relation to Debret’s original text, the artist’s representations began to be reproduced without his criticism, assuming a consecrating and nostalgic function of the times of slavery, a reflection of a society that has not ceased to be racist and that still cultivates violence”, highlighted Marins.
Debret’s works
The first panels of the exhibition are dedicated to the indigenous issue, showing the domination over original peoples. Next, the images portray the lives of slaves and the work they were subjected to. “We get this image that slaves worked on the plantation, we carry a lot of clichés. When you look at these images, you realize the variety of jobs”, said Gabriela Longman.
“They were barbers, servants at home, they ground sugar, they went hunting with scientists. There are a series of jobs here [na imagem] In the shoe store, there is a shoemaker in the center, but the slaves are the ones doing the bulk of the work,” he reported.
Longman emphasizes that the images reveal a bipartite society, in which there is enormous social distance and extremely violent conditions. The curator reports that Debret did not spare, in his works, details of violence and the protagonism of the work of enslaved Africans in Brazil, who were traditionally made invisible in artistic representations of everyday life.
The curator points out that, not surprisingly, the theme of violence runs through the works of contemporary artists in the exhibition. “Why do we revisit Debret today? Why do artists look at this with so much emphasis? Because there are gigantic transformations in society and there are permanences”, he said.
Debret arrived in Brazil in 1816, joining the French Artistic Mission as a painter for the Portuguese-Portuguese court. During the 15 years he lived in the country, he not only fulfilled government orders, but created images about the social and political diversity that characterized Rio de Janeiro, during long sessions sitting on the sidewalk.
Unpublished works
Among the highlights are two new works. Recognized for investigating the marks left by slavery and structural racism, Rosana Paulino participates with the new work Paraíso Tropical. The artist revisits the historical conception of Brazil as an idyllic paradise – an image that has spanned centuries of representations – to reveal a narrative that exposes a territory marked by extractivism, whose fauna and flora have been widely explored.
Artist Jaime Lauriano presents the installation Brazil through the mirror, also new and which addresses themes such as ethnocide, cultural appropriation and racial democracy. Lauriano also exhibits, in the exhibition, the series Justiça e Barbárie, made up of eight photographs of violence found in the media, especially scenes of lynching of black men that circulate in the media.
Lauriano uses titles of works by Debret in the photographs, in order to tension the present and the past, questioning what has really changed in Brazilian social dynamics. “After what happened in Rio de Janeiro two weeks ago, this wall [com as fotografias] it gained more relevance than it already had”, said Longman when referring to the police action in Complexo do Alemão that resulted in more than 120 deaths.
The exhibition also features works by Anna Bella Geiger, Bruno Weilemann, Cássio Vasconcellos, Claudia Hersz, Denilson Baniwa, Eustáquio Neves, Heberth Sobral, Laercio Redondo, Livia Melzi, Sandra Gamarra, Tiago Gualberto, Tiago Sant’Ana, Val Souza and Valerio Ricci Montani.
A room in the exhibition space is dedicated to a parade about Debret designed by the school for the 1959 carnival, recorded in images through the lenses of photographer Marcel Gautherot (1910-1996).
The exhibition will run until May 17th next year, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 5pm.
