Alberto Martins (Santos SP 1958)
Recorder, sculptor, writer and poet. FFLCH/USP. At the beginning of the 1980s, he studied engraving with Evandro Carlos Jardim (1935) at the Department of Plastic Arts of the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo - ECA/USP. In 1985, he received a CAPES/Fulbright improvement scholarship, and studies engraving in metal, woodcuts and art history at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York. Since that time, he has dedicated himself to wood engraving, sculpture and poetry, and works as an illustrator. He is the author of the books Poemas (Duas Cidades, 1990) and Cais (Editora 34, 2002), illustrated with engravings of his own. He is also dedicated to children's literature and launches the books Goeldi - História de Horizonte (Paulinas, 1995), for which he receives the Jabuti Prize, and the Forest and the Foreigner (Companhia das Letrinhas, 2000), a poem made with Base on gouaches and watercolors by Lasar Segall (1891 - 1957). In 2000, he completed his PhD in Visual Poetics from ECA/USP with the work entitled CAIS - a set of drawings, woodcuts, sculptures and poems that present images taken with formal economy and constantly resumed: hoofs of ships, boats, cranes, volumes and boxes, present in the port landscape of his hometown.
Critical Comment
In the 1980s, Alberto Martins holds an engraving course with Evandro Carlos Jardim at the School of Communications and Arts from the University of São Paulo - ECA/USP. In 1985, he attends an arts course at the Pratt Graphics Center, in New York, with a CAPES/Fulbright scholarship. Since that time, he has dedicated himself to wood engraving, sculpture and poetry, still acting as an illustrator. He is the author of the books Poemas (1990) and Cais (2002), illustrated with prints of his own. As noted by the poet Antonio Fernando de Franceschi (1942), the literary expression and that of the plastic artist preserve their autonomy, despite impregnating each other. In his most recent work, the artist explores the affective load that can be linked to a place or a landscape.
In the series of woodcuts entitled Cais (Dec.1990), he takes up an excerpt from the landscape of Santos, São Paulo, his city Christmas. The hulls of ships, cranes, cargo and boats are constant, icons cut out in the port landscape, worked with a graphic economy, almost at the limit of suggestion.
In the sculptures made in the 1990s, it uses rigorous geometry and the abstract cut. Later, it turns to the representation of recurring elements in their engravings. Its sculptural production maintains an approximation with the graphic work, also standing out for the rigor of the line and for the formal conciseness. He is also a poet. In our midst, the most notable examples of the convergence of plastic and poetic expressions in the work of the same artist are probably Manoel Araújo Porto Alegre and Jorge de Lima. This would be enough to draw our attention to the emergence of an artist like Martins. But what impresses in his work, above all, is the way in which the two expressions, which he practices with equal talent, preserve his autonomy despite a deep reciprocal impregnation. of formal proximity, but of the coherence with which they update, each in their own way, fundamental questions of art. (...) As a creative experience, poetry in Martins is consubstantial with plastic art. He reveals that, many times, when working in the studio, he feels as if he is 'writing through things'. One of the landmarks of this extraterritorial writing is certainly the constructive concern. In 1989 the artist went to Montevideo to learn about the work of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, on a voyage - or initiation rite - who seems to have sealed his commitment to the canon proposed by the Uruguayan master of constructivism: rigor of syntax and imagination. Of these two precepts, the latter predominates in Martins' recent works. Breaking the closed geometry and the abstract cut that marked, vigorously, his initial production, the artist now does not avoid figuration. Accurate profiles of keels and cranes are repeated in the wide series of engravings. However, they are not drawings of existing objects, but icons that cut from the pier. Spots of light and shadow are opposed with such force that it is possible to perceive, by refraction, the gravity of the ships. The procedure is strict, stripped, there is no room for emphasis or ornament, and the construction is organized only with dense core resources".
Antonio Fernando de Franceschi
MARTINS, Alberto. sculptures, reliefs and engravings. São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 1996.
"In the pages of Alberto Martins' work on visual poetics, the poems play with the woodcuts, establishing a combinatorics between the two fields. In it, an engraving can be repeated, while the poems take place on the pages, also performing other permutations. Both are related in presence, so that illustration, as a representation of an absentee, has no place: neither engraving exposes poetry, nor poetry explains engraving. The simultaneity of the two arts throws them to the common reference: the city, the harbor, the waterfront, the sea. There is, therefore, no factual circumscription, such a city, which is built at the turn of the reference both in sambaquis and reports from travelers and in the view from the top of the mountain sweeping the Baixada, in the multiplication of visual sites. In correspondence to this landscape, another is exposed, that of the subject, both in the utterance and in the utterance. The intensities of the subject are, homologically, shifting in the discourse. Engravings can also be exposed successively, which contradicts the Enlightenment concept that representation is simultaneous and discourse is successive. However, the repetition of the same snippet of engraving reinforces, as a punctuation, the poetic succession. When the book brings other engravings, ships, cranes, cargo, sections with pieces of keels, pieces of cargo, pieces of harbor, pieces of sea, where the subject multiplies, intensively multiply, is seen. Despite the compactness of the xylographic bodies, their notation is shorthand and the effect of such a presence contradicts, but only apparently, the lightness of poetry, which at one anchor and the other disembarks".
Leon Kossovitch and Mayra Laudanna
engraving : 20th century Brazilian art. São Paulo : Itaú Cultural: Cosac & Naify, 2000. p. 31.
Testimonies
a - How did your relationship with engraving come about?
B - It was in 1981, in Evandro Jardim classes; at first at FAAP and then at ECA. I knew what engraving was. I understood that it was something that had to do with the line and, as the line was the engine of the drawing I made at the time, I went after the engraving. I came from literature. Some watched classes and left; but many stayed. I stayed. The engraving has a curious thing (perhaps this is typical of all the arts, but in my case, it took place via engraving): the more you give it, the more it asks and the more it asks more returns. So in a short time I realized that there we were not only learning engraving, but many other things, and in a way those classes were for me the continuation of Brazilian literature classes, which I had had in the Letters course, because they provided a point, a place in the world, from which to think about their Action.
a - But what exactly was left of these classes in your work?
b - What was left for me and my colleagues was to understand engraving as a poetic thought of its own. In other words: not a genre, not the translation of something that is thought of in another medium and then transposed to the engraving. but a thinking of oneself - a vertical doing.
a - I don't know if I understand. . .
B - Good. . . Engraving how to make vertical means that engraving is a specific way of apprehending the world, different from painting, different from sculpture. Based on this observation, there are a series of developments. . .
a - Who are the colleagues you referred to?
b - I cite about four or five that actually represent a larger group. In my case, conversations with Mubarac, Buti, Laurita Salles were good. Back in the 1980s, early 1990s, conversations were important to build common soil. [...] Several of these issues came to the fore at the engraving exhibition that Sônia Salzstein organized at the São Paulo Cultural Center in 1990. In addition to them were also Elisa Bracher, the PT - Paulo de Tarso, Herman Tacasey and more people... focusing this on four or five, because there are more people and, in the end, everyone deals with it in their own way... and has younger colleagues...
a - You had a passage through the United States.
B - It was in 1985, Pratt Graphics, from New York. I worked on metal engraving; I attended painting, sculpture classes, all with poor results. In the last few months, I took eight woodcut classes... and it was the salvation. The need to solve the image concisely, without additions, helped me build. From there I hit the xylo.
a - And the sculpture?
b - The sculpture has always been around. Today I see that I wanted to make sculpture for a long time, but I didn't have the means. I didn't know how to do it. So I approached the cut of the xyl when making the sculpture, being good and unsuccessful, according to the work. But there came a time, around 1992, 1993, when the imagination of the sculpture began to invade the engraving - and neither one nor the other worked. Neither the sculpture happened nor the graphic had enough tension. So I had to stop the engraving and, for a year, a year and a half, I was giving vent to the sculpture. Then I found the focus again. The later engravings - those of the hooves, the boats, the cranes and the loads - somehow have to do with the sculptures I'm making today, which are wood and iron masses by docking. But now engraving is engraving and sculpture is sculpture. At least, that's how I think.
Alberto Martins - São Paulo, June 2000
engraving : Brazilian art from the 20th century. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural: Cosac & Naify, 2000. p. 206.
Individual exhibitions
1995 - Poços de Caldas MG - Sculptures, reliefs and prints, at the Casa da Cultura de Poços de Caldas
1996 - São Paulo SP - Sculptures, reliefs and engravings, at the Moreira Salles Institute
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Friends of Engraving: Alberto Martins, at the Céu do Céu/Museus Castro Maya Museum
Exhibitions Collectives
1981 - Santos SP - 8th Young Art Salon of Santos - Drawing Award
1982 - Santo André SP - 10th San André Contemporary Art Salon, at the Municipal Palace
1983 - São Paulo SP - paper, at the Tenda Gallery
1984 - Curitiba PR - 6th Engraving Exhibition City of Curitiba, at the Cultural Foundation of Curitiba
1986 - Curitiba PR - 7th Engraving Exhibition Cidade de Curitiba, at Casa da Engraving do Solar do Barão
1987 - São Paulo SP - Impressions from São Paulo, at Galeria Sesc Paulista
1988 - Curitiba PR - 8th Engraving Exhibition City of Curitiba, at Casa da Engravura Solar do Barão
1989 - Rio January RJ - 11th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at Funarte - Acquisition Award
1990 - Amadora (Portugal) - 2nd Bienal de Amadora
1990 - Mexico City (Mexico) - Historical Process of La Gráfica Brasileña
1990 - São Paulo SP - 21st Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1990 - São Paulo SP - Recorders, at CCSP
1990 - São Paulo SP - Program Annual Plastic Arts Exhibition, at CCSP
1991 - Curitiba PR - 48th Salão Paranaense, at MAC/PR
1991 - Valparaíso (Chile) - 10th International Biennial of Art of Valparaíso
1992 - Curitiba PR - 10th Engraving Exhibition City of Curitiba. Show America, at the Engraving Museum
1992 - Santiago (Chile) - Grabbed by contemporary Brazilian artists, at the National Museum of Bellas Artes
1993 - João Pessoa PB - Xylograph: from Cordel à Gallery, at the Espaço Cultural da Paraíba Foundation
1993 - Maastricht (Holland) - The First International Print Biennial Maastricht
1993 - Ribeirão Preto SP - Engravings, at the Museum of Art of Ribeirão Preto
1993 - Santos SP - 4th National Biennial of Santos, at the Patrícia Galvão Cultural Center
1994 - Brasília DF - São Paulo engraving, at the Rubem Valentim Gallery
1994 - São José dos Campos SP - 1st Engraving Biennial of São José dos Campos
1994 - São Paulo SP - Alberto Martins, Déborah Paiva and Teresa Viana: Module II, at the Citibank Cultural Space
1994 - São Paulo SP - Continuous engraving, at CCSP
1994 - São Paulo SP - Woodcut: From Cordel to Gallery, in the Metro
1995 - São Paulo SP - Collective 34, at Adriana Penteado Contemporânea
1995 - São Paulo SP - Goeldi: Our Time, at MAB/FAAP
1995 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo engraving, at the São Paulo Art Gallery
1996 - São Paulo SP - Sculpture Garden CCSP
1997 - Belo Horizonte MG - 25th National Art Salon of Belo Horizonte, at MAP
1997 - Curitiba PR - The Contemporary Art of Engraving, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Curitiba
1998 - São Paulo SP - Viagens, at Itaú Cultural
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Exhibition Rio Engravura. São Paulo: Engraving today, at the Gustavo Capanema Palace
1999 - São Paulo SP - a swidden, an oasis, at the Lasar Segall Museum
2000 - São Paulo SP - Investigations. The Brazilian engraving, at Itaú Cultural
2001 - Brasília DF - Investigations. The Brazilian engraving, at Galeria Itaú Cultural
2001 - Penápolis SP - Investigations. The Brazilian engraving, at Galeria Itaú Cultural
2003 - São Paulo SP - The engraving goes well, thank you: the Brazilian historical and contemporary engraving, at Espaço Virgílio
2004 - São Paulo SP - 8th Cultura Inglesa Festival, in the Brazilian Center British
2004 - São Paulo SP - New acquisitions: 1995 - 2003, at MAB/FAAP
Source: Itaú Cultural
