Chanina Luwisz Szejnbejn (Zofjowce, Polônia 1927 - Belo Horizonte MG 2012)
Painter, draftsman, printmaker, illustrator and teacher.
He emigrated to Brazil with his parents at the age of nine and settled in Belo Horizonte. In the mid-1940s, he studied metal printmaking with Anna Letycia (1929 - 2018), lithography with João Quaglia (1928) and composition with Fayga Ostrower (1920 - 2001) in that city. In 1946, he studied painting and drawing with Guignard (1896 - 1962) and sculpture with Franz Weissmann (1911 - 2005) at the Instituto de Belas Artes de Belo Horizonte, now Escola Guignard. That same year, he entered medical school at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), graduating in 1955. Alongside his medical practice, he devoted himself to art and teaching, becoming a painting teacher at Escola Guignard. He designed book covers and illustrations, especially for the Suplemento Literário of the Diário Oficial de Minas Gerais. In 1984, he was awarded the Medalha da Inconfidência, an honor granted by the Minas Gerais state government to figures who contribute to the projection of Minas Gerais culture.
Critical Commentary
Chanina's painting is characterized by intense colorism and rests on an approach in which fantasy is the dominant note. The subjects of his paintings are highly varied, including landscapes, figures, clowns, horses and portraits, among others. Throughout his career, Chanina also made some forays into lyrical abstraction, in works such as Abstração [Abstraction] (1964) and O Sonho [The Dream] (1988). For the essayist Isaías Golgher, the range of colors in these works harmonizes with form, since its function is not merely decorative. On the other hand, the theme of imaginary cities, which runs through decades of Chanina's output - Festa em BH [Festival in BH] (1955) and Noite de São João no Interior [St. John's Night in the Countryside] (1999) are examples - shows the links between his painting and the work of Guignard, with whom he studied in 1946. Some lessons left by the master strongly mark his work: graphic line, line as a decorative element, and modulated color in the figures and often in the landscape. According to the artist Yara Tupynambá (1932), also a student of Guignard, a recurring feature of Chanina's work is the combination of homogeneous color in the foreground with freedom of line in the background. In addition, the artist takes from Guignard the use of transparent color, the use of blues and the delicacy of half-tones, permeated by a dreamlike lyricism. To all these characteristics Chanina also adds something of the poetic fantasy of Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985).
Critiques
"Chanina's painting speaks. With its lively, sharp, unmistakable tones but, above all, through the richness, always more or less fantastic, of its formal content. Chanina does not like to portray anything or anyone, although he knows how to do so excellently on the few occasions when he grants objectivity the privilege of disciplining his fantasy: his strength is the perception of an opulent, formidable, astonishing inner world that imposes its presence, that overflows irresistibly onto external reality and shatters it. His painting, in any attempt or defined phase, is never abstract, nor photographic. It is always a 'Chaninian vision', very personal, the offspring of undeniable artistic originality, the inner treasure of someone profoundly, and perhaps disconcertingly, human."
Malomar Lund Edelweiss
CAVALCANTI, Carlos; AYALA, Walmir, org. Dicionário brasileiro de artistas plásticos. Apresentação de Maria Alice Barroso. Brasília: MEC/INL, 1973-1980. (Dicionários especializados, 5).
"His Jewish origin, his upbringing and life in Minas, the practice of medicine: at the confluence of these forces, the painter Chanina produces a strongly humanist body of work, dense, dramatic, charged with a peculiar sensitivity, not without a certain lyricism that corresponds, within his worldview, to the recognition of art's own redemptive possibilities. The expressionism that marks all his work - figurative or not - stems from the artist's own cultural roots, which, as in Chagall, overcoming the tragic sense of life, will make his painting into poetry. A lyric, Chanina paints with his heart, letting flow, from a mesh of pronounced graphic marks lit by magnificent color, a constellation of image-symbols that break the limits of reality to nest in the highlands of fantastic regions. His mythical characters - women with doves and flowers, medieval knights, starry horses and sorcerers - and his landscapes of Minas and of other realms all fit within this circle of dream and fantasy, which color and the rich texture of the pictorial matter further accentuate."
Márcio Sampaio
SAMPAIO, Márcio. Chanina. Suplemento Literário Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, v. 22, n. 1095, p. 3, 5 mar. 1988. Edição especial.
Solo Exhibitions
1961 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at União Israelita
1965 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Galeria Tijuco
1971 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Mini Gallery
1972 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Galeria Ami
1975 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Galeria Ami
1977 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Galeria Ami
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Galeria Guignard
1982 - Belo Horizonte MG - Retrospective, at Palácio das Artes
1988 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Palácio dos Leilões
2004 - Belo Horizonte MG - Solo, at Museu da Inconfidência
Group Exhibitions
1952 - Belo Horizonte MG - Belo Horizonte Municipal Fine Arts Salon
1953 - Belo Horizonte MG - 2nd University Art Salon - 1st prize in painting
1954 - Belo Horizonte MG - Belo Horizonte Municipal Fine Arts Salon - honorable mention in drawing
1964 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Guignard
1964 - São Paulo SP - Artistas Mineiros [Artists from Minas Gerais], at Galeria Atrium
1966 - Belo Horizonte MG - Belo Horizonte Municipal Fine Arts Salon - 1st prize in painting
1966 - Brasília DF - 3rd Brasília Modern Art Salon
1966 - Curitiba PR - 23rd Paraná Fine Arts Salon, at Biblioteca Pública do Paraná
1966 - Salvador BA - 1st National Visual Arts Biennial
1966 - Vitória ES - 1st National Visual Arts Salon - bronze medal
1967 - Belo Horizonte MG - Belo Horizonte Municipal Fine Arts Salon - acquisition prize
1967 - Curitiba PR - 24th Paraná Fine Arts Salon
1967 - Ohio (United States) - Brazilian Artists
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 16th National Salon of Modern Art
1967 - São Paulo SP - 9th São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
1968 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 17th National Salon of Modern Art, at MAM/RJ
1969 - Barcelona (Spain) - Salon of the 8th Joan Miró International Drawing Prize
1969 - Belo Horizonte MG - 1st National Contemporary Art Salon - special mention
1969 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at AIB
1969 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 18th National Salon of Modern Art
1969 - São Paulo SP - 1st Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1970 - Barcelona (Spain) - Salon of the 9th Joan Miró International Drawing Prize
1970 - Ouro Preto MG - Artistas Mineiros 60/70 [Artists from Minas Gerais 60/70], at the 5th Ouro Preto Winter Festival
1970 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 19th National Salon of Modern Art, at MAM/RJ
1971 - Curitiba PR - 28th Paraná Salon, at Biblioteca Pública do Paraná
1972 - Barcelona (Spain) - Salon of the 11th Joan Miró International Drawing Prize
1973 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Guignard
1974 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Ami
1974 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Guignard
1976 - Belo Horizonte MG - Exhibition of the Murals of the Belo Horizonte Municipal Schools
1976 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 25th National Salon of Modern Art
1977 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Ami
1977 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Galeria Guignard
1977 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Palácio das Artes
1977 - São Paulo SP - 9th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - 2nd State Culture Council Salon - award winner
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - Group show, at Palácio das Artes
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - Show of the Murals of the Municipal Schools
1981 - Belo Horizonte MG - 8th Global Winter Salon, at Palácio das Artes
1981 - Belo Horizonte MG - Alunos de Guignard [Guignard's Students], at Itaugaleria
1981 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 8th Global Winter Salon, at MAM/RJ
1981 - São Paulo SP - 8th Global Winter Salon, at Masp
1989 - Belo Horizonte MG - Caminhos da Liberdade: Bicentenário da Inconfidência Mineira e Centenário da República [Paths of Freedom: Bicentennial of the Inconfidência Mineira and Centennial of the Republic], at Secretaria de Estado de Cultura
1990 - São Paulo SP - Arte e Medicina [Art and Medicine], at Sadalla Galeria de Arte
1996 - Belo Horizonte MG - A Cidade e o Artista: dois centenários [The City and the Artist: Two Centennials], at BDMG Cultural
1996 - Belo Horizonte MG - Consolidação da Modernidade [Consolidation of Modernity], at MAP
1996 - Belo Horizonte MG - Improviso para Guignard [Improvisation for Guignard], at Espaço Cultural Bamerindus Seguros
1997 - Contagem MG - Alunos de Guignard em Contagem [Guignard's Students in Contagem], at Casa de Cultura Nair Mendes Moreira
Source: Itaú Cultural
