Luiz Henrique Schwanke (Joinville SC 1951 - Idem 1992)
Painter, draftsman, sculptor, actor, playwright, set designer and advertising professional.
A graduate in social communication from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), he was self-taught in drawing, painting and sculpture. From the late 1970s, he was a regular presence in national exhibitions and salons, standing out with several awards. Alongside his visual research, he worked in advertising and as a playwright, actor and set designer. In 1980, he held a solo show at the Galeria Sérgio Milliet of the Fundação Nacional de Arte - Funarte in Rio de Janeiro, with works that make explicit recurring concerns in his career: an interest in light, the use of industrial materials and references to art history. In the 1980s, he went back to live in Joinville. Between 1985 and 1987, he developed the sequence of profiles Linguarudos [Loudmouths], drawings and paintings made with quick gestures that convey violence and obsession. In 1989, he showed three-dimensional serial works at the Museu de Arte de Joinville, some of which were installed in public spaces. He took part in the 21st São Paulo International Biennial in 1991 with the project Cubo de Luz [Cube of Light], a sculpture made from an immense beam of light. In 2003, the Instituto Luiz Henrique Schwanke was founded in Joinville.
Critical Commentary
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, through drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, Schwanke developed an ongoing reflection on the place of art in the contemporary world. He combined procedures typical of pop art, conceptualism and minimalism, such as quoting paradigmatic works from art history and appropriating and serially producing images and industrial objects. His interest in the dichotomy between light and dark and in the role of light in defining objects also runs throughout his career.
In the group of drawings and paintings titled Linguarudos [Loudmouths], produced in the second half of the 1980s, the artist presents hundreds of variations of the same enraged male profile, tongue and teeth showing, screaming or vomiting. Some are made on newspaper pages or ledger sheets. The lines and brushstrokes are openly gestural, as if there were no mediation between the impulse that produced them and the final image.
Around this time, Schwanke began producing three-dimensional works by serially arranging plastic household objects such as buckets, hoses, clothespins and jugs. As the art critic Harry Laus points out, in this series the arrangement of elements forms columns and wall reliefs that evoke classical architectural structures1. The beauty of the objects' design is enhanced by repetition and by their ordering in compositions of exact proportions. The columns installed in public spaces stand out in particular for their monumentality.
According to the artist, the theme of chiaroscuro in the works of the Italian painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610) became an obsession for him2, prompting research that resulted in the work Cubo de Luz [Cube of Light], shown in 1991 at the 21st São Paulo International Biennial. A powerful beam of light produced by dozens of spotlights set below floor level in a large cubic pit constitutes his attempt to give shape to light. In Schwanke's words, "the Cube of Light has as its paradox an immaterial, penetrable, visible volume that is impossible to contemplate"3.
Notes
1 - LAUS, Harry. O voo maior de Schwanke. In: Museu de Arte de Joinville. Schwanke esculturas. Joinville: Museu de Arte de Joinville, 1989.
2 - SCHWANKE, Luiz Henrique. Depoimento. In: 21ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. Catálogo Geral. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, Marca D'Água, 1991, p. 297.
3 - Idem, p. 298.
Critiques
"Schwanke is one of the most vigorous personalities in contemporary visual art in southern Brazil. He moves from an ironic, conceptual hyperrealism toward, now, neo-expressionism. (...) Schwanke often dwells on capturing, aggressively and ironically, heads that he turns into grimaces/signs, or anatomical details linked to the erotic parts of the human body, such as breasts. (...) On disposable material - which he uses as a support - Schwanke makes a gestural record of the human being. He composes large panels with rectangles of human profiles which, far from being clichés, represent voracity, violence and individual chaos. The Faces/Grimaces let out the howls of the human beast, and the whole, in a heightened rhythm, shows the desires of a brutalized society that is destroying itself. (...) More than a mere record, the artist makes a harsh critique that leads him to strip away the prevailing aesthetic standard; (...). His irreverence denounces the deterioration of Western civilization on the eve of the 21st century, offering, via the collective unconscious, a catastrophic existential reading. (...)"
Adalice Araújo
ARAÚJO, Adalice. Luiz Henrique Schwanke. Galeria: revista de arte, São Paulo: Area Editorial, n.6, p.56-57, 1987.
Solo Exhibitions
1972 - Florianópolis SC - Solo, at Masc
1975 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at MNBA
1976 - Florianópolis SC - Solo, at Galeria Studio Az
1976 - Joinville SC - Solo, at Galeria Açu-Açu
1976 - Joinville SC - Solo, at Casa de Cultura
1980 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Sérgio Milliet
1991 - Porto Alegre RS - Solo, at Itaugaleria
Group Exhibitions
1962 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Children's Art Salon - honorable mention in drawing
1969 - Curitiba PR - 1st Visual Arts Exhibition of the Diretório Acadêmico Rocha Pombo, at UFPR
1971 - Curitiba PR - 2nd Visual Arts Exhibition of the Diretório Acadêmico Rocha Pombo, at UFPR
1971 - Curitiba PR - Salão dos Novos [New Artists Salon] - honorable mention
1972 - Santa Catarina - 1st Visual Arts Salon of the Island of Santa Catarina
1976 - Curitiba PR - 33rd Paraná Fine Arts Salon
1977 - Curitiba PR - 34th Paraná Fine Arts Salon
1977 - Curitiba PR - Artistas Catarinenses [Artists from Santa Catarina], at MAC/USP
1979 - Curitiba PR - 36th Paraná Fine Arts Salon - award winner
1979 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd National Visual Arts Salon, at MAM/RJ
1983 - Curitiba PR - 5th Brazilian Drawing Show, at Teatro Guaíra
1984 - São Paulo SP - 15th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 8th National Visual Arts Salon, at MAM/RJ
1985 - São Paulo SP - 3rd São Paulo Contemporary Art Salon, at Fundação Bienal
1986 - Curitiba PR - Tradition/Contradiction, at MAC/PR
1986 - Fortaleza CE - Imagine: The Planet Greets the Comet, at Arte Galeria
1986 - Porto Alegre RS - Paths of Brazilian Drawing, at Margs
1986 - São Paulo SP - 4th São Paulo Contemporary Art Salon, at Fundação Bienal - acquisition prize
1988 - São Paulo SP - 6th São Paulo Contemporary Art Salon
1991 - Porto Alegre RS - BR/80: Brazilian Painting of the 1980s, at Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana
1991 - São Paulo SP - 21st São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
1991 - São Paulo SP - 22nd Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
Posthumous Exhibitions
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX [20th Century Brazil Biennial], at Fundação Bienal
1996 - Porto Alegre RS - O Universo Poético de Schwanke [The Poetic Universe of Schwanke], at Pinacoteca Barão do Santo Ângelo do Instituto de Artes da UFRGS
1998 - Florianópolis SC - 6th Victor Meirelles National Salon, at Masc
2003 - São Paulo SP - Projeto Schwanke: perspectiva das artes plásticas em Santa Catarina [Schwanke Project: Perspective of the Visual Arts in Santa Catarina], at Memorial da América Latina. Galeria Marta Traba
Source: Itaú Cultural
