Lia Menna Barreto (Rio de Janeiro RJ 1959)
Plastic artist.
Between 1975 and 1978, Lia Mascarenhas Menna Barreto Curses Arts and Drawing in the free studio of the Porto Alegre City Hall. He studies painting with Luiz Paulo Baravelli (1942) and drawing with Rubens Gerchman (1942 - 2008), in 1984. He holds an individual exhibition at the Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum (Margs), in Porto Alegre. Participates in the 10th National Salon of Plastic Arts, in 1988, at the National Art Foundation (Funarte), in Rio de Janeiro, in which the Acquisition Award is awarded. Between 1993 and 1994, he lives in San Francisco, United States, and studies at Stanford University with a scholarship granted by the International Fellowship in the Visual Arts program, from the America Arts Alliance. In 1997, he exhibits works at the 6th Bienal de Havana, the Los Angeles Biennial and the 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, in Porto Alegre, in which he participates again, in 2003, in his 4th Edition.
Critical Comment
In the early 1980s, Lia Menna Barreto carries out several works with foam, used to shape solids with an organic appearance. It is also during this period that he begins to use children's toys, especially dolls, in his works. This production highlights the then young artist in the national artistic circuit and becomes his distinctive trait.
In the 1990s, he expands his repertoire and composes works that use plastic dolls, rubber animals, stuffed animals and other toys. He also carries out, in the first years of that decade, works covered in different fabrics, in an unfolding of his works with foam, which explore sculptural procedures through sewn shapes.
In works produced between 1993 and 1994, Lia It dismembers several dolls, separating, for example, heads and arms, which are sewn with plush in unusual montages; makes openings inside the dolls' bodies, exposing their filling; Or, it adds doll arms and legs to teddy bears, creating other and strange arrangements. Mounts like these promote an operation of displacement of meaning and transformation of the usual relationships that are established with objects.
The interest in simulacra, dolls, carts, animal toys, artificial flowers is shown in a large part of their production. The artist elects these symbols of childhood and affection and, through formal disassembly and assembly operations, relocates them to another plane of representation.
From the mid-1990s onwards, she develops works with plastic dolls. Often the artist mixes dolls with animals, flowers and plastic leaves, which are fused with heat and attach to the silk fabric, in works that are exposed vertically, on the wall.
In the 4th Mercosur Biennial, in 2003, presents the factory installation, in which it exposes its process of creating the work with rubber animals. In the exhibition space, with several tables, work instruments and numerous frogs, rats, lizards, ants, spiders, snakes and other rubber animals scattered on the ground, the public can observe how the work is formed through the homemade melting of objects with iron.
Criticism
"It is impossible to separate the organic character from Lia's works, from their materiality. One is born from the other simultaneously. The solids made four years ago resulted from a clearly sculptural process. They were thinned, carved, and in some cases received a dark coloring. The foam, the structure of the works, was only flesh, bones and skin, since it did not receive coating. Hence, although they did not allude to any lively identifiable form, they were inevitably associated with organisms.
The structural nudity of the initial solids indicated, virtually, an inside that did not yet exist, because the work was concluded in the meat of the material used. The works now shown demonstrate a maturation of the bowels for the surface of the pieces that currently have skin, all of which are coated with different fabrics.
There is no change in the sculptural procedures as before, which continue to play a structural role in the pieces. The novelty lies in the adoption of constructive methods in the making of the surface of objects. The coating of most of them results in the sewing of parts, whose articulation resembles the idea that the constructivists established about the specialty of their process in the face of the tradition of sculpture: their work was due to the articulation of parts - which was departed from the traditional techniques of the latter, bringing them closer to the methods of construction of modern engineering".
Fernando Cocchiarale
COCCHIARALE, Fernando. 1990.
"The artist's normal procedure is to section the dolls, enabling new and multiple montages, as if it operated with the creative freedom of the fable, shaping their objects according to linguistic games, which have a 'Narrative' parallel that is almost a linguistic joke. A good example is one of his most disconcerting works, in which he agglutates a baby into his cart into a single object, pouring his corrosive action over the baby-carrier-significant duo, consecrated by the habit.
The condensed space, which agglutina Forms, creating unexpected objects, acts critically on an everyday, automatic perceptual equation, in order to reveal its absurdity and strangeness. With the same humor colored balls and doll parts come together in doll acrobat. In nocturnal order, Lia exchanges parts of dolls with a plush body, resulting in cripples reminiscent of a taste for the grotesque in circuses or even in ancient cuts, where deformed dwarves were jealously kept for general delight. For the artist, these deformations resemble the hidden order of the world, the nocturnal order, or even the universe of the unsaid, of perceptual automatisms and affective incongruities".
Carlos E. Uchôa Fagundes
FAGUNDES, Carlos E. Uchôa. Lia Menna Barreto and the hidden order of the world. In: Salão Arte Pará, 14, Belém, 1995.
"Lia Menna Barreto confronts images of representation and simulacra of affection. His work takes into account the ability of the toy to activate the children's imagination and, now, for its use, to recover this possibility of affective play. Art, tells us Argan, is a precise moment of relationship of alterity, a moment in which the other reaps meanings in the significant structure, the work of art, constituted by the artist. Toy and Art - We are not of doubles, but of instances of the real.
It is not, moreover, a process of monstrification through the brutalization of toys. And at no time does Menna Barreto seem to be interested in toys being reduced to anthropomorphic metaphors. What interests him, in fact, are the possibilities of, in working with toys, intervening in an order of objects and operating in the field of the bankruptcy of reason and its crisis. Lia Menna Barreto therefore works on the field of desires. The abject character of some of his works also points to an economy of the symbolic order. An overload of the unconscious circulates in the intricacies of a panicked functionality. Abject matter produces meanings in the process of forming subjectivity. In the work, the toy then reveals itself as a language game. In the work of Menna Barreto, the experience is that of unlearning and transgression. The crisis, more precisely, is that of the subject himself."
Paulo Herkenhoff
HERKENHOFF, Paulo. Almost toys by Lia Menna Barreto. In: Barreto, Lia Menna. Lia Menna Barreto: Night Order Rio de Janeiro: Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art, 1995.
Individual exhibitions
1985 - Porto Alegre RS - Individual, at Margs
1987 - Porto Alegre RS - Individual, at Galeria Arte & Facto
1990 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art
1993 - São Paulo - Individual, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1994 - Porto Alegre RS - Individual, at the Iberê Camargo Gallery
1994 - São Paulo - Individual, at the Camargo Vilaça Gallery
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Night Order, at Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art
1996 - São Paulo SP - Origin of Affection, at the Camargo Vilaça Gallery
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - Affective Kit, at Torreão
1998 - Porto Alegre RS - Affective exercises, at Margs
2000 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at the Camargo Vilaça Gallery
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - Diary of a doll, at the Contemporary Art Gallery Open Work
2000 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Individual, at the Pedro Cera Gallery
2003 - Porto Alegre RS - Individual, in the art bag
Collective exhibitions
1983 - Porto Alegre RS - 12th Salon do Jovem Artist
1984 - Curitiba PR - 3rd Exhibition of Brazilian Design
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 8th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at MAM/RJ
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 10th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at Funarte - Acquisition Award
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Project Macunaíma 88
1989 - Brasília DF - New values of Latin American art, at MAB/DF - Guest Artist
1989 - Porto Alegre RS - Arte Sul 89, at Margs
1991 - São Paulo SP - 22nd Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP - Guest Artist
1992 - Porto Alegre RS - 2nd Sculpture Exhibition, at the Municipal Culture Center
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Contemporany Art Project, at Funarte and EAV/Parque Lage
1992 - São Paulo SP - A look at the figurative, at Casa Triângulo
1993 - Bogotá (Colombia) - Brazil Hoy, in Valenzuela & Klenner Gallery
1993 - Brasília DF - A look at Joseph Beuys, at the Athos Bulcão Foundation
1993 - Porto Alegre RS - Collective, at the Casa de Cultura Mario Quitana
1993 - Porto Alegre RS - The Pop Spirit - Influences on the current art of Rio Grande do Sul, at MAC/RS
1993 - São Paulo SP - The presence of ready-made, 80 years old, at MAC/USP
1993 - Washington (United States) - Brazil, images of the 80's & 90's, at the Art Museum of the Americas
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil: images from the 80s and 90s, at MAM/RJ
1994 - San Juan (Porto Rico) - small Latin American format 94, at Luigi Marrozzini Gallery
1994 - São Paulo SP - Brazil: Images from the 80s and 90s, at Casa das Rosas
1994 - São Paulo SP - Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at Casa das Rosas Rosas
1994 - São Paulo SP - Sculpture Collective, at Espaço Namour
1995 - Belém PA - 14th Salão Arte Pará - Guest Artist
1995 - Porto Alegre RS - Gesamtkunstwerk, at the Goethe Institute
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Perverse childhood: fables on memory and time, at MAM/RJ
1995 - Salvador BA - perverse childhood: Fables on Memory and Time, at MAM/BA
1995 - São Paulo SP - 80s: The stage of diversity, at the SESI Art Gallery
1996 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Latin America 96, at the Museo Nacional de Belas Artes
1996 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Objects: 8 artists from Los countries del Mercosur
1996 - São Paulo SP - 15 Brazilian artists, MAM/SP
1997 - Mexico City (Mexico) - ASI ESTA LA COSA, INSTALACION AND ARTE OBJECT EN AMÉRICA LATINA, at the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo
1997 - Havana (Cuba) - 6th Bienal de la Hahana, at the Contemporary Art Center Wifredo Lam
1997 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Project 15 Bandeiras, at Culturgest
1997 - Los Angeles (United States) - Los Angeles Biennial
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, at the Mercosur Biennial Visual Arts Foundation
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - Last Lustro dc-navegantes
1997 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 15 Brazilian artists, at MAM/RJ
1997 - São Paulo SP - Three-dimensionality in Brazilian art of the 20th century, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Aachen (Germany) - der Brasilianisch Blick, at the Ludwig Forum Íur Internationale Kunst
1998 - Belo Horizonte MG - Three-dimensionality in Brazilian art in the 20th century, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Berlin (Germany) - der Brasilianisch Blick, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
1998 - Brasília DF - Three-dimensionality in Brazilian art of the 20th century, in Itaugaleria
1998 - Heidenheim (Germany) - der Brasilianisch Blick, at Kunstmuseum
1998 - Lisbon (Portugal) - From the vanguards to the end of the millennium, in the Culturgest
1998 - Penápolis SP - Three-dimensionality in Brazilian art of the 20th century, at Itaugaleria
1998 - São Paulo SP - Cohntemporânea, at the Thomas Cohn Gallery
1998 - São Paulo SP - der Brasilianisch Blick, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1998 - Wiesbaden (Germany) - Almost nothing, at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden
1999 - Graz (Germany) - The Anagrammatical Body, at Neue Galerie Graz/Kunsthaus Múrzzuschlag
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Daily life/Arte. Object 60s/90s, at MAM/RJ
1999 - São Paulo SP - daily life/art. Objects 60/90, at Itaú Cultural
2000 - Novo Hamburgo RS - Itinerant Exhibition of the MAC Collection, at Centro Universitário Feevale
2000 - San Diego (United States) - Ultrabaroque, Museum of Contemporary Art
2001 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Playground, at Galeria Pedro Cera
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Blind Mirror: Selections from a contemporary collection, at the Paço Imperial
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Blind Mirror: Selections from a contemporary collection, at Paço Imperial
2001 - São Paulo SP - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
2001 - São Paulo SP - Caminhos da Forma, at the SESI Art Gallery
2001 - São Paulo SP - Chelpa Ferro and Lia Menna Barreto, at the Fortes Vilaça Gallery
2001 - São Paulo SP - Blind Mirror: Selections from a contemporary collection, in the MAM/SP
2001 - São Paulo SP - Blind Mirror: Selections from a Contemporary Collection, at MAM/SP
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/RJ
2002 - Salvador BA - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
2002 - São Paulo SP - Insólitos, at Espaço MAM/Villa-Lobos
2002 - São Paulo SP - Parallel, Shed located at Avenida Matarazzo, 530
2002 - São Paulo SP - Rotating Phase 2, at Galeria Fortes Vilaça
2002 - São Paulo SP - Territories, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake
2002 - Toronto (Canada) - Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, at the Art Gallery of Ontario
2003 - Porto Alegre RS - 4th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, at the Cais do Porto
2003 - São Paulo SP - My friends, at Espaço MAM/Villa-Lobos
2003 - São Paulo SP - Ordination and Vertigo, at CCBB
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - New acquisitions 2003: Gilberto Chateubriand Collection, at MAM/RJ
Source: Itaú Cultural
