In the works of the Minas Gerais artist Rita Lessa shown here, the multiple art history references play a clear role: to bring up to date the questions brought up by artists as diverse as the Dutch Hieronymus Bosch (?-1516) and the Spanish Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), among so many others that have marked her career. The surrealist category, particularly Marcello Grassmann’s (1925-2013) beasts and medieval knights, inspired her early works as an illustrator, building a close connection between modernity and classical art.

 

That naturally leads to another core reference of the artist’s: the greatest invention of the German historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Warburg is known to have revolutionized art history with his Atlas Mnemosyne, a collection of black panels featuring images from different yet related eras: from Renaissance paintings to modern, mundane newspaper clippings, including reproductions of archaeological works.

 

Warburg hoped his Atlas might organize a culturally boundless world where the aesthetic legacies of different cultures in different contexts could converge, rejoining the contemporary imaginary like “ghosts” to spark creativity. This was indeed Rita Lessa’s procedure amid the pandemic: cataloguing her personal archive into a raisonné of sorts, which brought her close to Warburg’s studies, both those devoted to the resurgence paganism among the moderns and his reflections on Italian Renaissance.

 

In Rita Lessa’s case, her entire oeuvre is divided into sections. Organized under a logic similar to that of Warburg’s Atlas, the Brazilian artist’s Álbum (Album) is one of the sections of her work, comprising paintings such as the ones in this exhibit. The titles of her different series deliberately do not match what their contents suggest, an approach driven by the critical need to confront linguistic “imposture,” according to Lessa. Evoking the ground zero of conceptual art – the piece One and Three Chairs (1965), by the United States’ Joseph Kosuth, comprising a real chair, its description, and a photograph of it –, the artist ironizes competent discourse, christening her works with anarchic titles à la Lewis Carroll. The exhibit’s very title, ÇA, a French demonstrative pronoun, is one such provocation.

 

The series devoted to the circus evidently features the filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) as a turning point between the hybrid creatures created by Goya (especially in the Los Caprichos engraving series) and the human remains that become autonomous bodies, like the cut-off ear coupled with a knife in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, which is at the Prado Museum. Both are quoted in Rita Lessa’s series devoted to a personal “revision” of art history. Here, the artist directly addresses the anthropological mutation that has turned us all into circus attractions.

 

From Goya’s Caprice 20, Lessa borrows the bizarre figures of two plucked chickens swept away by a prostitute, symbolizing the lost dignity of two “respectable” gentlemen (the chickens), castrated with the knife with which Bosch represents phallic power in his Garden of Delights, emphatically associated with a deaf ear to the call for ethics from the spiritual world. Withdrawn from context, those fragments from Goya and Bosch take on fresh contours and meanings, as do other pieces out of the 30 featured here. They accommodate references ranging from literature (Hölderlin’s poetry, James Joyce’s enigmas) to cinema (Bergman, Fellini), including surrealism.

 

Although the sculptures in the exhibit obliquely evoke the fusion of fantastic beings wrought by another Minas Gerais artist, Maria Martins (1894-1973), they share little to nothing with the mythic figures of Amazon indigenous peoples sculpted by Martins in the 1940s. Rita Lessa does not emulate those compositions. Rather, her cross-breeds spring from the unconscious: they are projections that incorporate the erotic and verge on the scatologic. Desire and repugnance walk together just like in fairy tales. Or in the worst of nightmares.

 

A vigorous reference to Arte Povera is the series of textiles on show in the ÇA exhibit. As a child, Rita used to watch homeless people in Minas Gerais cities such as Cataguazes and Pirapora. The sight of their torn, precarious clothes dragging on the floor became etched in the artist’s memory. The pieces in the exhibit are like a testimony to her reverence of 1960s Italian Arte Povera. They are a series of textiles painted and worn out by the artist, closely tied to the critical reflection on abject poverty and overconsumption delivered by artists such as Kounellis, Mario Merz, and Pistoletto. And it is still current, by the way.

 

Antonio Gonçalves Filho