When the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), responsible for censorship and state terrorism against opponents of the Brazilian military regime, carried out the routine inspection of the ninth Sao Paulo Art Biennial (1967), it found two works that made him uncomfortable. One was the series of five paintings about the Brazilian flag by Quissak Junior and the other was a painted wooden box by Cybèle Varela (Petrópolis, 80 years old), a then emerging artist, who participated in group exhibitions and won her first awards. Her work, titled The gift (The Gift), simulated a gift package inside which the viewer found the torso of a soldier portrayed on the map of Brazil. From his chest, with the help of a spring, a foam heart with a verse from the hymn to the Brazilian flag jumped: “Receive the affection that is enclosed in our youthful chest.” Sarcasm and acidity from a 24-year-old artist who challenged the dictatorship established in 1964 to win the affection of youth. The piece was removed from the exhibition, but it marked the spirit of Varela’s production: to capture a generation that, while governed with a heavy hand, sought new ways of living, expressing itself and dressing, leaving the deep-rooted Catholic tradition and embracing the counterculture. of the sixties.
“I was very sad [con la censura de O presente] because it was made precisely to interact with the public. There was an atmosphere of tension and mistrust at that time. A second-degree cousin disappeared and until today his father has not been able to bury his body,” Varela recalls from his apartment in Madrid, the city that has been his home for six years and where he presents his book this Monday. Trajectories from the Italian publisher Silvana. The publication emphasizes his first artistic period that developed during a time of profound transformations in Brazil. In addition to the dictatorship, the cultural effervescence was palpable in the multiple currents that emerged in all the arts and sought a break with the past, such as the New Brazilian Objectivity (to which Varela subscribed), music tropicalia, Cinema Novo or the Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) movement. The art critic Paulo Miyada writes in Trajectories that “opinion” is the best word to define that generation: “It is not by chance that it was used in those years as the name of exhibitions, musical shows, theater groups, theater festivals and newspapers.”
Varela’s triptych Of everything that can be (1967), exhibited in the exhibition The World Goes Pop (2015) from the Tate Modern in London, synthesizes this desire to leave conservatism and build a new idiosyncrasy. The paintings that make it up are sequential and narrate an urban scene. In the first, two teenagers are seen wearing miniskirts (a symbol of rebellion popularized by the model Twiggy) on one side of the street and on the other, two nuns; In the second, they meet at the zebra crossing and in the third they appear with their clothes exchanged: the nun wears a miniskirt and the girl wears a religious habit. In all three paintings a traffic sign appears: “Continue forward.” “I wanted to show the street as the only point of contact between two worlds, two times,” says the artist.
Brazil’s transition in the sixties not only affected the cultural sphere, but also the population and society. Urban demographics were expanded with rural-urban migration – the southeast, the most populated region of the country, lost 43.2% of its rural inhabitants in the sixties -, with the expansion of the educational system and with the entry of a greater number of middle class women in the labor market. This compendium of diversity is represented in another triptych, Pedestrians (1967). Black men, blonde women, men in ties and coats, hippies, farmers, military police and street merchants meet at a red light signal. “The urban scenes, the street vendors, the characters who coincided on the zebra crossings caught my attention.”
Another painting that shows the agitation and growth of the city is street scenes (1968). “The street, the culture of the street, of the masses. That was my real school. That formed me and gave me a foundation. It was not Iván Serpa [su profesor en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Río], nor my father. There was help but I got the basis from mass culture, I was impressed with the colors of the street,” Varela told Valentina Locatelli in 2018, who has served as curator in several of her exhibitions. The plurality of new identities and the cultural proposals that made them visible suffered a severe blow with the historic Institutional Act No. 5, which suspended political rights, institutionalized violent repression and expanded the powers of general and president Artur Da Costa.
The dictatorship prompted Varela to self-exile to Paris in 1967 and he has not returned to live in Brazil since. After the city of light came a stay in Geneva, then Rome and since 2018, the Spanish capital. “I think that in Madrid there is greater activity for contemporary art. “People who go to Rome usually go to see the classical masters,” he justifies his decision to move. His work The kiss (1967) was acquired at the end of last year by the Reina Sofía, who called her “one of the most important Brazilian artists of the second half of the 20th century,” and was part of the exhibition A time of your own (2023) from the Pompidou in Malaga.
In a 2018 interview he said that he felt that Brazilians did not know who Cybèle Varela was. Today, she claims that the sensation has disappeared. “I had that feeling because I moved to Europe very young and that distanced me. Even so, she exhibited every two years at the Bonino gallery in Rio. I was very nostalgic but kill the longing with my paintings.” In his first years abroad he continued to represent that changing society that he had left on the other side of the Atlantic. The mass media were another of his objectives, mainly television that reached every corner of the country with the founding of TV Globo in 1965.
The popularization of Silly box brought the broadcast of the Miss Brazil pageant that turned the winners into true stars that graced the covers of magazines. Varela ironized the contest in Miss Brazil and the Swan (1968), in which, with strong colors and simple figures, he painted four identical women to eliminate their subjectivities and reproduce them as a pattern of consumption, standardized, repeated and disposable. The woman would later become the protagonist again in her work, but before, in the seventies and eighties, she went through a conceptual stage in which she studied light, the effects of shadow and the geometric shapes that she projects on the surface. wall. She did light exercises with painting, photography and video as in images, in pictures (1976), which was acquired by the Pompidou Museum in Paris.
The female figure returns in the paintings The artist 1 y The artist 2, both from 1999. She takes a surreal setting to represent herself painting but she can also be seen, in other smaller images within the same work, doing housework: cooking, ironing. “This shows the difficulty for a woman to have a career and have to take care of domestic duties at the same time. It was very difficult. Sometimes, I had to go to galleries for professional meetings with my baby because I had no one to leave him with.” In other paintings such as Nothing to declare (2010) o Danger (2012) projects the most rabid feminist movements as ninjas armed with katanas and swords.
Although she was never part of feminist groups, Varela is aware that her work is being revalued – she starred in a retrospective in 2018 in Basel and another in 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo – thanks to a movement that is revaluating the work of women who were invisible in their time. She remembers, by the way, when she was the only female artist included in the traveling exhibition 30 Creators , which included representatives of the Figuration Narrative movement, such as Peter Klasen or Pierre Alechinsky. “The scene then in Paris was very masculine, there were unfriendly and rude colleagues, but it didn’t affect me because I felt the support of the critics who always supported me,” recalls Varela to whom articles were dedicated. The world y Le Figaro and even had a meeting with Dalí.
Although social issues are transversal to her work, Varela never considered herself a political artist. Her perception of her surroundings has been built based on her experience in such a particular country in such an exceptional time, which led her to deal with the contradictions of her time. Her imagination is made up of the images she saw on her daily bus trips from her native Petropolis to Rio de Janeiro to study at the Museum of Modern Art. She talks about her after class talks with her classmates and later representatives of the New Brazilian Objectivity (Rubens Gerchman, Claudio Tozzi). “I have preserved my identity as a Brazilian through my colors. The colors, the people, the sounds of Brazil are strong and unique.”
At 80 years old, he continues to produce new work, which he keeps secretly with suspicion in his workshop until it is publicly exhibited. He produces to “satisfy a need” and does not see an end nearby: “It becomes more difficult with age, but not impossible. It’s more tiring, I have to stay standing, I need glasses to see up close and I take advantage of when my arm doesn’t shake to make straight lines, but I continue working.” He likes to talk about his persistence and illustrates it with a passage from the Madrid journalist and art critic Rosa Olivares in Trajectories: “The naturalness with which Varela seizes new forms includes her in that group of artists who renewed painting through a hybridization of young and experimental languages, and on that is based part of her relevance and persistence throughout the years.” over time.”