Arthur Omar (Poços de Caldas MG 1948)
Photographer, multimedia artist.
graduated in Sociology. Arthur Omar de Noronha Squeff worked with different languages, such as cinema, video, photography, installations, music, poetry and drawing. He also writes essays and theoretical reflections on art. In 1974, he performed the feature film Triste Trópico, selected in 1982 for the retrospective exhibition of Brazilian cinema at the Festival of the Three Continents, in Nantes, France, and videos about the production of several artists, such as the Nervo de Prata, in 1987, on Tunga (1952), and skidding in Eden, in 1997, on Cildo Meireles (1948). As experiments in the field of video installation makes Tristan and Isolda, in 1983; Silences of Brazil, in 1992; Inferno, in 1994, and Actos de Diamante, in 1998. Presents at the 24th International Biennial of São Paulo the set of Anthropology of the Glorious Face Photographs, a panel with 99 images in black-and-white, developed by the artist in 20 years. Some of these images are reworked in the series Colored A Pele Mecânica, 2003. Omar receives an award from the São Paulo Association of Art Critics - APCA, for the exhibitions The Splendor of Contraries and Fractions of Light, which took place in 2001. He publishes the photography books. Anthropology of the Glorious Face, 1998, The Zen and the Glorious Art of Photography, 1999, and The Splendor of Contraries, 2002.
Critical Comment
Arthur Omar began his artistic career in the 1970s, acting as a film director. Later, he also works with video, photography and writes aesthetic and poetic essays. In the series of photographs entitled Anthropology of the Glorious Face (1973-1998), carried out in black and white, it records anonymous people, participants of the carnival in Rio de Janeiro, seeking to capture the expressions of madness, joy or sadness on their faces. From these photos, it interferes with the revelation, adding colors or luminous tracks, as in the series A Pele Mecânica (2003), in which it also explores the seriality of pop art.
Demons, mirrors and celestial masks (1998) is a set of self-portraits, in which the artist produces graphic and pictorial interventions during the revelation, giving them terrifying or tragic character. In the series O Splendor dos Contras (2001), it takes photos of Amazonian landscapes, in which it recreates the light and spatiality of the place.
The themes related to ecstasy, social violence and also the construction of visual metaphors marks its trajectory.
Criticism
"Artist of extirpe from the Vinciana, who films, photographs, draws and composes music practically alone, Arthur Omar bravely resists the attempts to categorize His place in Brazilian culture strongly rejects labels such as 'experimental filmmaker' or 'multimedia artist', preferring the classification of an amateur artist. Which in it does not mean an attitude of modesty. 'I am the best of amateurs', it is defined, using the tone From a boy who is pleased to play with the effect of words and vanity itself. 'In terms of Brazilian cinema, I am the first of a lineage', advances a little more. (...) Arthur Omar's multifaceted work is of the order of immaterial engineering. Its operation Basic consists of building bridges between apparently irreconcilable categories, but which reveal surprising approximations in the alchemy of their creation. the documentary and the experimental, the ethnographic and the mythical, the festive and the dramatic communicate through the obsessive use of the metaphor. (...) One of the artist's signatures is the ascension movement. People who look at the sky or are monumentalized by a camera facing upwards, narration of ascending routes, flights of birds, fireworks, clouds. It is evident that Arthur Omar's desire to detach himself from the literal surface of things to reach the zone in which they relate to the cosmos. (...) Arthur Omar's achievements in the sound field are one of the most stimulating and least known. Silêncios do Brasil was an audio installation he created for the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in 1992, setting the vast foyer of the building with noises from the jungle and rain, ritual songs and fragments of music sampled in order to produce in the listener the feeling that Silence had a way that could be worked on. It has been so since the early 1970s, when, at the beginning of his career, Omar lashed out at traditional documentary filmmakers in the manifesto O Antidocumentário, provisionally. The text criticized the documentary as a 'by-product of narrative fiction', a mere spectacle where the film did not allow itself to be 'fertilized' by the subject dealt with. Compared to that moment, the guerrilla today seems more thoughtful, armed only with his digital paraphernalia. The verbal machine gun still has the same start, but it turns mainly to the continuous polishing of its 'theoretical fictions', an exercise that occupies it with visible pleasure". of the State of São Paulo on 11/5/97.
"Arthur Omar is one of the great names of experimentalism in Brazil, with a multimedia work that encompasses cinema, video, photography, music, poetry, in addition to theoretical reflection. His work appears in the early 1970s, when he works as director and screenwriter in the making of about ten short films and a feature film. (...) In the photographic area, his biggest project has been the Anthropology series of the Glorious Face 4, a work in progress that has been developing for twenty years, adding more than a hundred photos. A true obsession with the human face, taken in the carnival trance, guides the artist in the creation of these glorious faces in full ecstasy, faces that transform the anthropological vision in the light of poetry. (...) Another important photographic series, composed of eighteen self-portraits with the title Demons, Mirrors and Celestial Masks, was held this year. Inspired by German expressionism, more especially in the work O Creiro, by Edvard Munch, Arthur Omar intervenes with nervous and dirty graphic incisions on his own face, composing the image of terror. The exuberance of graphics and color accentuates the tragic and violent feeling that interests him as an observer and participant, man and photographer, someone who thinks affectively the world. The self-portraited, 'sense inside eyes closed', according to the author's words, is equivalent to a collective face, to the human condition. (...) Next to the photography exhibitions, and the exhibition Os Ten thousand Coisas (1993), in which he showed drawings and collages selected from a collection of ten thousand pieces, made for twenty years, Arthur Omar has also carried out multimedia environmental facilities. The facilities may involve TV monitors, slide projectors, objects, documentary sound material, electronic music and electroacoustic techniques. (...) The installation, within the set of Arthur Omar's work, is a moment of synthesis, a place where he condenses cinema, video, photography and the real world, where he inserts the experience in the 'anthropology' of the spectator, triggering emotions and senses there. Coupled with the visual work, the artist also develops sound experiences, composing the musical scores of his own works and that of third parties. With structural action together with the universe of images, the music intensifies the dramatic atmosphere of the work and punctuates the rhythm of the montage with the same climax as the iconographic development. In the polymorphism of Arthur Omar's production, literature also highlights, a field to which he dedicated himself through poetry, many gathered in the book O Assno Íris, and of theoretical practice, which he condensed in the book Cinematographic Investigations. Articles and essays written for several publications - newspapers, magazines and books - published to a wider scale the artist's reflection, revealing in him a sensitive and acute thinker of cultural issues in Brazil". Arthur, Mandarino, Luciane (Coord. ). Demons, mirrors and celestial masks. : Centro Cultural Light, 1998. p. 24-25.
Testimations
"The photos that make up the collection of the anthropology of the glorious face were captured exactly like the images from my videos: no script, No project. At first, it's just the theme, and nothing else. I start to work. Slowly, the question arises. entering me. It is the moment when I and the other enter together in what I call ecstasy. Ecstasy, in the theory of the anthropology of the glorious face, is the basic guiding thread. I believe that we are all going through glorious states, all the time, somewhere secret in our psyche. We are magical, mythical figures. Even in the most elementary person on the planet, the human potential of transcendence is there. But when it happens, it is at a speed that the meshes of consciousness cannot capture. They are very wide. They cannot apprehend the particle: it is a minimum point that crosses any network. An infinitesimal fish, therefore impossible to fish. The photographic act, the act of filming, happens, in its radicality, when I, in some way, through the camera (and I have to have the device with me, in availability, with the intention of carrying out that) I call on this particle of mine. And this particle, and the other, suddenly, the two particles, like a particle accelerator, clash at that moment; It is a fraction, it is infinitesimal. The moment the photograph is shot, I don't see anything. An almost automatic thing. Particle shock against particle, which makes me reach a transcendent state. But I can do nothing against this state, nor take any lessons from it, simply because it was so brief that I didn't even know that I hit it. The only thing I can do is, in later stages, to work on the matter that was generated there, at that moment, of which I do not keep memory, because it has passed a lower degree of resolution than my mental capacity to retain. I have to work on this material a posteriori. Restart the process from scratch, but at a higher level, in a subsequent technical step. In the case of photographs, the faces are discovered. then a transformation of matter. Granulation, relegation, selection of fragments, magnification, cutting, cutting, framing. an active and blind retrospection of a superior state that left no trace on me".
Arthur Omar
OMAR, Arthur. Zen and the Glorious Art of Photography : Workbook. Text Ligia Canongia, Arthur Omar, Aluisio Pereira de Menezes; English version Luís Augusto Silveira; Design Sônia Barreto. Rio de Janeiro : Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1999. p. 8-10.
Exhibitions Individuals
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Anthropology of the Glorious Face I: Photographs, at MAM/RJ
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Tristão and Isolda: Environmental Installation, at Funarte. Milliet
1990 - New York (United States) - Retrospective exhibition at MOMA
1993 - São Paulo SP - Anthropology of the Glorious Face II: Photographs, at MIS/SP
1997 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Demons, Mirrors and Celestial Masks: 18 Self-portraits, at the Light Cultural Center
1997 - São Paulo SP - Massaker!, at Casa das Rosas - Video Installation
1997 - São Paulo SP - Muybridge/Beethoven, at Paço das Artes - Video Installation
1998 - São Paulo SP - Demons, Mirrors and Heavenly Masks: 18 Self-portraits, at MAM/SP
2000 - São Paulo SP - Riverão, at Shopping Center Iguatemi - Video Installation
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The logic of ecstasy: retrospective, at CCBB
2001 - São Paulo SP - The splendor of the opposites, in the CCBB
2003 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at Galeria Nara Roesler
Collective exhibitions
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Time to look: Photographs, in MNBA
1985 - São Paulo SP - Art and Technology, at MAC/USP 
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - ECO 92: Silences of Brazil: Sound Installation, at CCBB
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Erotic Art, at MAM/RJ
1994 - São Paulo SP - 1st Art City: Cities Without Windows, at the Municipal Slaughterhouse of Vila Mariana
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século 20th, at the Fundação Bienal
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 24th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/RJ
1995 - São Paulo SP - 1st United Artist, at Casa das Rosas  
1997 - São Paulo SP - In addition to the form/in the limit of the form, at Casa das Rosas
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 16th National Salon of Visual Arts, at MAM/RJ
1998 - São Paulo SP - 24th São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
1998 - São Paulo SP - Urban Flows, at Itaú Cultural  
1999 - Belém PA - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Rua Boaventura da Silva X Av. Doca de Souza Franco
1999 - Belo Horizonte MG - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Contorno X Av. Amazonas
1999 - Campinas SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition
1999 - Campo Grande MS - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Afonso Pena X R. Treze de Maio
1999 - Cuiabá MT - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Fernando Correia da Costa
1999 - Jundiaí SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Nove de Julho
1999 - Manaus AM - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Paraíba x Rua Efigênio Sales
1999 - Osasco SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. dos Autonomistas
1999 - Porto Alegre RS - 2nd Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, at Espaço Margs; At Espaço Usina Gasómetro and at Espaço Armazém do Cais do Porto (formerly Deprec)
1999 - Porto Alegre RS - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Goethe X Rua Mostardeiro and Rua Twenty and Quatro de Outubro x Rua Bordini
1999 - Recife PE - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition
1999 - Ribeirão Preto SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Presidente Vargas
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The image of the sound of Chico Buarque, at Paço Imperial
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Randômico field, at the Telephone Museum
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 3rd ART ELECTROMIDIA: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Venceslau Brás X R. General Severiano; Praça da Bandeira - West Radial, close to Praça da Bandeira; Humaitá - Largo do Humaitá
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Sculpture on stage, at MNBA
1999 - Salvador BA - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Tancredo Neves, 805
1999 - Santo André SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at R. Dom Pedro II X R. Catechesis
1999 - Santos SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition
1999 - São Paulo SP - 9th Pirelli Collection/Masp of Photographs, at MASP&NSP;
1999 - São Paulo SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Cidade Jardim x Av. Brig. Faria Lima Faria Lima; Av. Brig. Faria Lima x Av. Rebouças; Av. Eng. Luís Carlos Berrini X Av. Águas Espraiadas;Rua Vergueiro x Av. Paulista; Av. Juscelino Kubitschek x Av. Brig. Faria Lima; Av. Paulista X Al. Campinas
1999 - São Vicente SP - 3rd Art Electromidia: Virtual Exhibition, at Av. Presidente Wilson X Av. Antônio Emmerich
2000 - Havana (Cuba) - 7th Havana Biennale: 24 Studies for the Reconstruction of the Guernica of Picasso - Electronic Photographs
2000 - Havana (Cuba) - 7th Havana Biennial, downtown of contemporary art Wifredo Lam
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The image of the sound of Gilberto Gil, at Paço Imperial
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Situations: Brazilian art in the 70s, at Fundação Casa France-Brazil
2001 - Chicago (United States) - Art Chicago 2001
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Azzurro Amazurro: Athur Omar and Antonio Pedretti, MNBA
2001 - São Paulo SP - Trajectory of light in Brazilian art, at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Brasília DF - Fragments to its magnet, in the contemporary cultural space Venâncio
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Artephoto, at CCBB
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Worksite of Circo Voador, at Circo Voador
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Deviation & Norma, in the dromo project
2002 - São Paulo SP - 25th São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
2002 - São Paulo SP - Strategies to dazzle, at the SESI Art Gallery
2002 - sao paulo sp stock pictures, pictures, pictures in the collection of the museum of modern art of sao paulo, at mam/sp
2002 - sao paulo sp - open opera: celebration, at the house of roses
2002 - São Paulo SP - Portão 2, at the Nara Roesler Gallery
2002 - São Paulo SP - Six artists at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, at the Nara Roesler Gallery
2003 - Brasília DF - Artephoto, at CCBB
2003 - Madrid (Spain) - ARCO/2003, at Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 11th University, at Universidade Estácio de Sá
2003 - São Paulo SP - The Subversion of Media, at Itaú Cultural
2003 - São Paulo SP - Arco 2003, at Galeria Nara Roesler
Source: Itaú Cultural
