Eli Heil (Palhoça SC 1929 - Florianópolis SC 2017)
Eli Heil was a painter, designer, ceramist, sculptor, upholsterer and poet. In the 1950s, he worked as a physical education teacher. Self-taught, he began his artistic production in 1962, drawing animals and painting landscapes of hills with houses, using thick layers of paint and saturated colors. In 1963, he held his first solo show, in Florianópolis. That same year, critic and art historian João Evangelista de Andrade Filho (1931) published an essay on his work and presented it on display in Brasília. on canvas and then creating imaginary beings with different materials, such as ceramics, cement, wood, mortar and molten plastics. In 1966, he individually exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC/USP), at the invitation of historian Walter Zanini (1925). Two years later, he began exhibiting in European countries.
He participated in the 1st Latin American Bienal de São Paulo, in 1978, and the Unusual Art Section of the 16th International Biennial of São Paulo, in 1981. In 1982, the Santa Catarina Art Museum (MASC) held a retrospective show of his work. In 1987, he created the world of Eli Heil's egg, in the capital of Santa Catarina, where he installed his studio and a space for permanent exhibition of his production. The Ovo de Eli Heil Foundation was officially inaugurated in 1994. She is the author of the book of poems and drawings vomiting feelings, published in 2000.
Critical Comment
The whole of Eli's work. Heil draws attention for the variety of materials and methods used by the artist. Self-taught, he starts with drawing and painting, but soon starts to work with three-dimensional space, sewing embroidery and upholstered shapes on his canvas. It then builds sculptures using clay, cement, mortar, fabric, wood, molten plastic or recycled industrialized objects. In clay works, the surfaces loaded with textures and the volumes made with fragments of predominantly curved shapes stand out. The paintings are characterized, above all, by the technical stripping and the non-naturalistic use of colors. In some series, the large amount of ink gives colors a material density.
Eli Heil usually refers to his work as a spontaneous creation that would be the immediate transposition of his feelings on matter. His work can be considered within the scope of what the history of art calls primitive or intimate art (from the Latin insitus, innate): an unerudite aesthetic manifestation linked to themes of the popular imagination.1 Spontaneity constitutes the vigor and limit of his works. At the same time as it provides unpredictable formal and symbolic articulations, the artist's attitude is restricted to the concept of art as a synonym for self-expression.
Its first productions refer to the urban landscape of Florianópolis, where it lives. These are paintings showing hills with colorful houses that seem to float. Then the artist figures Christian icons and subjects related to the female universe, such as the woman's body and motherhood. However, most of his works feature hybrid beings composed of human forms, animals and mythological characters. These imaginary animals inhabit amorphous spaces made with spots and often merge with them.
Note
1 AQUINO, Flávio de. Aspects of Brazilian primitive painting. Rio de Janeiro: Spala, 1978. p. 11.
Criticism
"(...) We have no doubt in considering it as the greatest revelation of our art of primitive intuition in the last 20 years. its imagistic, plastic and technical qualities, strongly contrasting with the aspects of other primitives, whether from the North, Guanabara or São Paulo. regionalistic of those, the works of Eli Heil are defined as 'expressionist-abstract' (João Evangelista) vision, of a cosmic nature, which gives magnitude to their small world of hills and corrals. Time is an omnipresent function of their Space: it inscribes it in this fauve fauves color universe (applied to the canvas by a small stylus) and it drips into the undulating rhythm of the design of impressive psychological peculiarity. limits of hallucination: a logical organicity, however, all these oscillating images that, in the artist's evolution, always start from her inner experience, reason for her admirable authenticity".
Walter Zanini
Paintings and drawings by Eli Heil. Introduction by Walter Zanini. São Paulo: MAC/USP, 1966.
"Since all his work in art is a way of conjuring very strong mental pressures to which he is subjected, the frequent presence of mandalic structures and the resource to the animization of the inanimate (the houses become people, eye windows fixing us), in addition to a fantastic fauna characteristic accompanying these extremely intense faces in color, amazement and tension. It is also curious to observe, in the evolution of Eli Heil's drawing and painting, the intuitive obedience to the direction of overcoming the plane through the three-dimensional space, including as a means of alleviating the hallucinatory violence of the figures that it says 'to come out' from the paper or the canvas, involving it in the act of creating, so, after the first surface works Two-dimensional, the paintings came to gain importance in the management of grooves in the paint, until reaching the most recent addition of filling dolls applied to the worked plane of the canvas; in this way, their most elaborate pieces are the current object tapestries, where it continues to preserve the naive-expressionist deformation in violently colored hallucination masks, such as a direct record of the flowing unconscious".
Roberto Pontual
Pontual, Roberto. Art/Brazil/Today: 50 years later. São Paulo: Collectio, 1973.
Individual exhibitions
1962 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at Galeria Baú
1963 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at the Institute Cultural Brazil-United States - IBEU
1963 - Brasília DF - Individual, in the French alliance
1964 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at IBEU
1964 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Faculty of Law
1966 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at the Santa Catarina Art Museum - MASC
1966 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo - MAC/USP
1967 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria Solstice
1967 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences
1968 - Ibiza (Spain) - Individual, at Galeria Ivan Spence
1968 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria M. Benezite
1968 - Porto Alegre RS - Individual, at the Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum Ado Malagoli - Margs
1969 - Amsterdam (Holland) - Individual, at the Espace Gallery
1969 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at Masc
1971 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at MASC
1971 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria Solstice
1971 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at Galeria Barcinski
1971 - Amsterdam (Holland) - Individual, at Galeria Espace
1971 - Blumenau SC - Individual, at Galeria Açu-Açu
1973 - Copenhagen (Denmark) - Individual, at the Lousiana Museum
1973 - Oslo (Norway) - Individual, at the Sorya Henis Onstad Museum
1973 - Paris (France) - Individual, at the Debret Gallery
1973 - Paris (France) - Individual, in the gallery L'oeil de Boeuf
1973 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria M. Benezite
1974 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at MASC
1974 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at Galeria Oca
1977 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria L'Oeil de Boeuf
1978 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria L'Oeil de Boeuf
1982 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at Masc
1984 - Florianópolis SC - Retrospective Eli Heil, at MASC
1984 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria L'Oeil de Boeuf
1986 - Brasília DF - Retrospective, at the Museu de Arte de Brasília
1986 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at MASC
1989 - Paris (France) - Individual, at Galeria L'Oeil de Boeuf
1990 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at MASC
1992 - Florianópolis SC - 30 years of art, at the Santa Catarina Association of Plastic Artists - Acap
1993 - Florianópolis SC - Individual, at the AABB Cultural Space
1995 - Florianópolis SC - 66 years old, at the Santa Catarina Development Bank - BADESC
Collective exhibitions
1965 - Blumenau SC - 1st Pro Arte Nova Salon - 1st Special Reference Award
1967 - Brasília DF - 4th Salon of Modern Art of the Federal District, at the Cláudio Santoro National Theater
1968 - Campo Grande MS - 28 artists from the MAC/USP collection in São Paulo, at the Diário da Serra gallery
1968 - Florianópolis SC - 1st National Exhibition of Plastic Arts, at MASC
1968 - Caen (France) - Collective, at the Théâtre Maison La Culture de Caen
1969 - Fortaleza CE - 28 artists from the MAC/USP collection in São Paulo, at the Raimundo Cela
1969 - Geneva (Switzerland) - Beauuregard Salon
1969 - Florianópolis SC - Rádio Diário da Manhã Art Salon
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pre-Bienal de São Paulo, at the Bienal
1970 - Blumenau SC - Salão Santa Catarina
1971 - Curitiba PR - 28th Salão Paranaense, at the Paraná Public Library
1971 - Florianópolis SC - 12 artists from Santa Catarina, at the Santa Catarina Art Museum
1971 - Belo Horizonte MG - 11th National Salon of Plastic Arts
1971 - Blumenau SC - 2nd Collective of Plastic Arts Green belly
1971 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Collective, at the Museum of Modern Art - MAM/RJ
1972 - São Paulo SP - Sesquicentennial Art Exhibition of Independence and Plastic Brazil - 72, at the Bienal Foundation
1972 - Bratislava (Czechoslovakia - current Slovakia) - Bratislava Triennale
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 years later, at the Galeria da Collectio
1972 - Blumenau SC - 3rd Collective of Plastic Arts Belly-Green
1973 - Paris (France) - Collective, at Galeria Debret
1975 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Instituto E Popular Creativity, in the MNBA
1974 - Curitiba PR - Collective of Plastic Artists from Santa Catarina, at the Galeria do Centro Cultural Brasil Unidos Unidos - CCBEU
1976 - São Paulo SP - 8th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art MAM/SP
1978 - São Paulo SP - 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo. Myths and Magic in Santa Catarina Art: Eli Heil and Franklin Cascaes, at Fundação Bienal
1980 - Florianópolis SC - Quatro Ladies of Art from Santa Catarina, at MASC
1981 - Curitiba PR - 3rd Mostra of the Brazilian cartoon, at the Guaíra Theater
1981 - Naples (Italy) - Myth and Magia del Colore
1981 - São Paulo SP - 16th International Biennial of São Paulo, at the Biennial
1984 - São Paulo SP - Art of Santa Catarina, at FAAP
1990 - Aracaju SE - Arte em Contrast, at Shopping RioMar
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil: 100 years of Modern Art, in the MNBA
1993 - Florianópolis SC - Heil Family, at the Legislative Assembly of the State of Santa Catarina - Alesc
2000 - Miramas (France) - Collection Cérès Franco - Peintures, Sculptures, Sculptures Objects, at Miramas Château de Belval
2000 - Florianópolis SC - Victor Meirelles National Hall - Special Room
Source: Itaú cultural
