Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Japaratuba SE 1911 - Rio de Janeiro RJ 1989)
Arthur Bispo do Rosário was a visual artist. In 1925, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked in the Brazilian Navy and the Light Electricity Company. In 1938, after a mystical delusion, he presented himself to a monastery, who referred him to the Hospital dos Alienados, in Praia Vermelha. Diagnosed as schizophrenic-paranoic, he was admitted to Colônia Juliano Moreira, in the neighborhood of Jacarepaguá, in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1940 and 1960, he alternated periods of internment with work in Rio de Janeiro's homes. In the early 1960s, he worked at the Amiu Pediatric Clinic, where he lived in a small room in the attic. During this period, he began his artistic production, creating miniatures of warships, automobiles and various embroidery with rudimentary materials.
In 1964, he returned to Colônia Juliano Moreira, where he remained until his death. He produced about a thousand pieces using everyday objects, such as clothes and embroidered sheets. In 1980, his work was revealed to the general public through an article by Samuel Wainer Filho for the program Fantástico, on TV Globo. Two years later, art critic Frederico Morais included his creations in the exhibition à Margin of Life, at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ). His trajectory has been addressed in films, books — such as Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O Senhor do Labyrinth, by Luciana Hidalgo — and plays.
In 1989, the Association of Artists of Colônia Juliano Moreira was founded, with The objective of preserving his work, listed in 1992 by the State Institute of Artistic and Cultural Heritage (INEPAC). Its production is gathered at the Bispo do Rosário Museum, formerly called the Nise da Silveira Museum, located in the former Colony Juliano Moreira.
Critical Commentary
Arthur Bispo do Rosário's past is practically unknown. It is only known that he was black, sailor, boxer, bus washer and bodyguard. On the eve of Christmas 1938, he was admitted to the National Hospital for the Alienados, in Praia Vermelha, in Rio de Janeiro, after a mystical delusion. With a diagnosis of paranoid-schizophrenic, it is transferred the following year to Colônia Juliano Moreira, in Jacarepaguá. Among many permanences and departures, he lives more than 40 years in the institution, where he performs most of his work.
The works of bishops are diversified between juxtapositions of objects and embroidery. In the former, it usually uses everyday utensils from the colony, such as aluminum mugs, buttons, spoons, wood from fruit boxes, plastic bottles, shoes; and materials purchased by him or friends. For embroidery, he uses the available fabrics, such as sheets or clothes, and gets the wires by shredding the blue uniform of the inner. He prepares, with his work, a kind of inventory of the world for the Day of Judgment. On that day he would present himself to God, with a special cloak, as a representative of men and existing things. The embroidered mantle bears the name of the known people, so as not to forget to intercede with God for them. Bishop also makes banners, ceremonies, miss banners, binders, among others, on which he embroiders drawings, names of people and places, phrases with respect to newspaper news or biblical episodes, bringing them together in a kind of cartography. The creation of the pieces, for him, is a task imposed by voices that he claimed to hear.
In the early 1980s, with the issues raised by contemporary art with antipsychiatry and new theories about madness, the works of bishop began to be valued and integrated into the art circuit. In 1980, a report by TV Globo's Fantástico, on the situation of Colônia Juliano Moreira, shows his works, grouped in the little room where he lives. In the same year, the psychoanalyst and photographer Hugo Denizart (1946) makes the film The Prisoner of the Passage - Arthur Bispo do Rosário. With the dissemination, came the artistic recognition of the works, which contributes to their participation, in 1982, in the Exhibition à Margem da Vida, at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro - MAM/RJ, with the work of prisoners, minor offenders, the elderly and interns of the colony. Subsequently, his first individual exhibition is held, also at MAM/RJ. The art critic Frederico Morais writes about his work, linking it to the art of the vanguard, to pop art, to the new realism and especially to the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968).
In 1995, with a Vast selection of pieces, Bishop represents Brazil at the Venice Biennale and obtains international recognition. His work becomes one of the references for generations of Brazilian artists from the 1980s and 1990s.
Notes
1 Second Records of Light, where he works between 1933 and 1937, was born in 16 March 1911. In the records of the Navy of Brazil, where it serves between 1925 and 1933, it appears on May 14, 1909. He wrote about the 'artistic production' carried out in the confinement of asylums and asylums, or that of outsiders, marginals of the visual arts circuit and the culture system, without, however, giving it a role in the history of art, because this production slides to other meanings. The effort has been in the sense of determining a category of them - Art Brut, Unusual Art, Singuliers de l'Art - since they reveal creativity in a pure state, without any systematization or discipline, (...). of work, which consists of a romantic metaphor about being an artist: he, inside his cell, unraveled his inner uniforms to obtain faded blue threads with which he embroidered his cartography, mummified the objects of his daily life. The artist strips himself, strips himself to give existence to the work, signaling the transience of the body in opposition to the permanence of work".
Ivo Mesquita
MESQUITA, Ivo. Arthur Bispo do Rosário Gallery: Revista de Arte, São Paulo, N. 17, p. 122, 1989.
"The assemblages bring together generally industrialized objects, produced in series, linked to consumption and mass culture. On each panel a line of objects: aluminum mugs, buttons, plastic bottles with chopped paper, hardware, soaps, spoons, shoes, rubber boots, electrical and electronic material, ritual objects (macumba). Sometimes objects located in the same support differ from each other, but textures and materials resemble each other. Seen together, these accumulations are reminiscent of a bazaar or hardware store. They are like showcases and, not by chance, Bishop called them 'windows'. (...)
It also gathered in precarious bare wooden objects, sometimes with a thin hand of lime, reminiscent of the merzbilders of Schwitters. isolated objects, Duchampians, I would say, of deciphering still difficult, with a strong symbolic load, or simple entity of charmers, like these small boxes in which cut and multicolored papers are like musical notes".
Frederico Morais
MORAIS, Frederico The reconstruction of the universe According to Arthur Bispo do Rosário In: Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Records of my passage through the Earth Belo Horizonte: Museum of Art, 1990. p. 21, 24.
"The extreme originality that covers the work of these creators is the result of several factors: the almost absence of academic training, the release in relation to the spirit of time, the distance from social life, etc. In this ontological solitude resides the certainty of Fernando Diniz when he transforms into old art sheets, or the determination of Bishop of Rosario when he gathers banal objects in the Colony Juliano Moreira - one of the terminal deposits of human beings in the trajectory of psychiatric hospitalizations -, turning them into surprising facilities. (...) A being that had no studio, or encouragement by the environment, built a work driven by its interior, of an extreme contemporaneity, breaking and calling into question the very means that art is made."
Luiz Carlos Mello
MELLO, Luiz Carlos Flores of the Abyss. In: Exhibition of Rediscovery, 2000, São Paulo. 2000. P. 43.
"If it is a cloak or not, it may seem like an unimportant issue. Nevertheless, the designation 'mant' covers the nature of the social archetype on which Bishop of the Rosary elaborated. This work is born from the imitation of a garment of the nobility's clothing: part of the clothing of a king, or a general of the royal army. Only the jacket is of interest, because the ostentatious symbolic elements of power and nobility are concentrated in it, such as epables, embroidery, decorations. (...) What we have here is the artist's appropriation of a symbol object that in his eyes translates wealth, beauty, nobility, (...). semantics".
Ferreira Gullar
GULLAR, Ferreira. Lightning: to say the ver. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2003.
Testimonies
"Hugo: How did you end up here in this hospital?
Bishop: On December 22 I went down there, in São Clemente, Botafogo, at the back of a house like this, when I was recognized by the family. The next day, later, I performed at the Monastery of São Bento, on the 24th. On the 24th, I came here to live, right? commanded by the friars.
Hugo: by the friars?
Bishop: Yeah, they recognized me. I said like this: I came to judge the living and the dead. They noticed and they told me to come to the asylum. That even before, I there on Ilha do Governador (...) already said that I was coming to the hospice in order to judge the living and the dead. That's for those who see, who knows. A doctor, for example, who is a psychiatrist, when I arrived at Praia Vermelha, with two days I was called by a medical board. Dr. Odilon Galotti. I had a medical board in order to interrogate myself and they all realized that I had come to represent His holiness. Within this holiness, I allowed a strong house. The strong house belongs to Christ and so I started to reside in the strong house, in order to make miniatures, because they noticed my vision.
(...)
Hugo: This transformation you are undergoing. . .
Bishop: My presentation to the world. I must be ready in about six or five months (...) with action, radiance, from head to toe, in order to present myself to the world. Within this representation here.
Hugo: And what will this representation look like?
Bishop: I'm going to stanch and present the radiance in order to represent the world. And who should present me are those interested here in the colony who, according to the habitation of Christ, say: I, of the hospice, must present my transformation to the directors. Nothing else.
Hugo: To the directors?
Bishop: Yeah, to the directors, don't they stay here? The only ones who can introduce me are them. This was done for them. Just for them. Nothing else.
(...) Like these miniatures I made, it allows my transformation.
Hugo: Do the miniatures allow their transformation?
Bishop: Yeah.
Hugo: How does it allow it?
Bishop: Don't have the representation? I will introduce myself bodily. My bodily action is this brightness that I put.
Hugo: And these miniatures are representations.
Bishop: It is material existing in the land of men.
Hugo: It is a representation of everything that exists on earth?
Bishop: Yeah, it's jobs that exist.
Hugo: And you'll become Jesus Christ, what's it like?
Bishop: I'm not going to transform myself, boy, you're talking to him. It's more than seen. But for those who see, for those who can't see it, it doesn't stand up".
Arthur Bispo do Rosário in an interview with Hugo Denizart
Hidalgo, Luciana. "The angels open the beautiful Fine plume sponge foam where the verb bang comes out". In: _______. Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The Lord of the Labyrinth. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1996. p. 136, 137, 139.
Collective exhibitions
1982 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - On the margins of life, at MAM/RJ
Posthumous exhibitions
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Records of my passage through the land, at EAV/Parque Lage
1990 - Belo Horizonte MG - Records of my passage through the land, at the Pampulha Art Museum
1990 - Porto Alegre RS - Records of my passage through the land, at the Art Museum of Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli
1990 - São Paulo SP - Records of my passage through the land, at MAC/USP
1991 - Stockholm (Sweden) - Viva Brasil Viva, at Kulturhuset, Konstavdelningen Och Liljevalchs Konsthall - Special Room
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Recico, at the National Art Foundation. Arts Center
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Transforming and recreating the remains: the garbage passed clean, in the Imperial Palace
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Arthur Bispo do Rosario: Inventory of the Universe, in the MAM/RJ
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Bishop of the Rosary, at the Ibeu Copacabana Gallery
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Bishop of the Rosary, at the Ibeu Madureira Gallery
1995 - Venice (Italy) - 46th Venice Biennale
1996 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - O Navegante, at MNBA
1997 - Mexico City (Mexico) - Así is la Cosa: Instalación y Art Object in Latin America, at the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo
1998 - Brasília DF - I need these words. writing. , at CEF
1999 - São Paulo SP - Daily life/art. Objects 90s, at Itaú Cultural
1999 - São Paulo SP - Why Duchamp?, at Paço das Artes
1999 - São Paulo SP - Transcendence: Caixas do Ser, at Casa das Rosas
1999 - Vitória ES - I came at the Federal University. University Space Art Gallery
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil + 500 rediscovery show. Images of the Unconscious, in the Paço Imperial
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brasilidades, at the Light Cultural Center
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 rediscovery exhibition. Images of the unconscious, at the Bienal Foundation
2001 - New York (United States) - Brazil: Body and Soul, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
2002 - São Paulo SP - Open Opera: das Rosas
2003 - Paris (France) - La Clé des Champs et Arthur Bispo do Rosario, at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Art in Motion, BNDES Space
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Flags of Brazil, at the Museum of the Republic
2003 - São Paulo SP - Ordination and Vertigo, at CCBB
2004 - São Paulo SP - Brazilians, at the Afro-Brazil
Source: Itaú Cultural
