RE-ENCHANTING SURREALIST NARRATIVES

Brazil has not remained untouched by this fortunate wave and today celebrates the dreamlike, the fantastic, and the unconscious with more enduring projects that go beyond mere commemorations. Walter Lewy – O sonhador e a sublime criação do mundo (Walter Lewy – The Dreamer and the Sublime Creation of the World) and Sonhos ao sol – Miragens da arte na América Latina (Dreams in the Sun – Art Mirages in Latin America) are two significant publications featuring essays, documentation, and images of authors who have unjustly remained under-recognized by the market and contemporary art circuits.

Institutions have safeguarded various forms of this kind of production, though they often lack the financial means to carry out more ambitious initiatives or to take exhibitions on tour for broader audiences—at least within the country. Still, broad thematic overviews of these remarkable works took place in São Paulo’s visual arts scene in 2024, such as Reverberações Surrealistas (Surrealist Reverberations) at the Brazilian Museum of Art (Faap), Mentes em Transe (Minds in Trance)at the Mário de Andrade Library, and Surrealismo, 100 – A mão, o olhar e a ideia em movimento (Surrealism, 100 – The Hand, the Gaze and the Idea in Motion) at the André gallery.

Walter Lewy – O sonhador e a sublime criação do mundo (Galeria Frente, 152 pages) is an extension of the retrospective of the same title, held at the gallery until April this year, and features a main essay by veteran critic Jacob Klintowitz. Around 80 works—paintings, drawings, prints, and books—by Lewy belong to collectors Claude Vaskou and Eliana Minillo, who have been acquiring the German artist’s works since 2003.

Among the rich rarities are original prints from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, dated 1956, tied to the historic release by the Brazilian publishing house Civilização Brasileira. Beyond Lewy's painterly quality, his graphic work is admirable, as attested by these prints and other pieces like an untitled lithograph from 1973, Destruição (Destruction) from 1942, and Flor de Maracujá (Passionflower) from the same year. In these, the anguish stemming from the catastrophe of war blends with a formal and imaginative spirit full of freedom, so characteristic of the artist.

“In Walter Lewy’s work, we find the rigor of a new reality, precise and severe drawing, and above all the emergence of a new human reality, with its paradigmatic beings, imaginary spaces, and the mark of unknown objects and constructions,” notes Klintowitz in his essay.

On a pictorial perspective, highlights include untitled paintings from 1946, with opaque chromatics and dark settings typical of that period; from 1958, which participated in the 8th São Paulo Biennial in 1965; and from 1985, a generally less critically appreciated phase.

Lewy (1905–1995) was born in Germany and trained in Dortmund in the 1920s. Fleeing the economic crisis and the growing antisemitism in his homeland, he emigrated to Brazil in 1938, leaving behind numerous works in the Netherlands—works that were lost. Although he participated in six editions of the São Paulo Biennial up to 1975, he lived a kind of twilight phase at the end of his life and still does not receive the recognition his singular body of work deserves.

Austral Dreams

Sonhos ao sol – Miragens da arte na América Latina(Act Editora, 332 pages) is an ambitious project. Written by Fernando Ticoulat, this trilingual edition (Portuguese, Spanish, and English) presents 250 works by 139 artists born over the past 172 years. In addition to Ticoulat, the book includes texts by Suzanne Césaire (1915–1966), Hanna Limulja, and Leonora Carrington (1917–2011).

The list of artists features unavoidable names from Mexico (Frida Kahlo, Leopoldo Méndez, Remedios Varo, and Carrington herself), Brazil (Tarsila do Amaral, Cícero Dias, Ismael Nery, Maria Martins), and Argentina (Xul Solar, Grete Stern, Antonio Berni), among others. However, the publication’s major achievement lies in its research and presentation of lesser-known artists, particularly from the Caribbean and Central America, as well as underappreciated contributions from South American countries such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay. There are surprises: from the black-and-white works of Haitian-American Edouard Duval-Carrié and the hybrid figures of Peruvian Dalton Gata to the multifaceted visual worlds of the already-recognized Rodolpho Parigi and the still-underappreciated Paula Turmina and Fernanda Feher, the last three being from Brazil.

Naturally, the book also highlights exceptional trajectories such as that of Chilean Cecilia Vicuña and Paraguayan Julia Isídrez. It is particularly notable the consistent inclusion of more vernacular poetics and works by Indigenous peoples, such as Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), Arpilleras from Chile, and the Kuna communities from Panama.

“The Cartesian refusal of the metaphysical built a disenchanted, bureaucratized society, governed, clock-driven and devoid of space for emotion or imagination”, writes Ticoulat in his essay Divine, Marvelous!. “Rescuing the magic in artistic practices, especially in their most uncanny, hidden, and witchery manifestations, is an urgent task for re-enchantment with the world”, emphasizes Césaire in a text from 1941, now republished.

A future re-edition might benefit from including unconscious poetics like those of Darcílio Lima (1944–1991) from Ceará, Brazil, as well as photographic experiments by artists such as Guignard (1896–1962) in the 1940s and Jorge de Lima (1893–1953) in the 1930s. It would also be ideal to include another essay or a more comprehensive list of biographies about the fascinating compilation of artists featured in the book.