Banquete tupinambá

EVERYTHING THAT MY BODY FEELS IS THOUGHT
Fernando Pessoa’s expression seems to be a motto for the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, as well as for her partners Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. This generation that was born into art with the Brazilian neo-concretism of the end of the nineteen fifties had, in the words of Oswald Andrade, an energy that made it possible to transform the tradition of western abstract art into corporality, resetting it within the specific condition of the tropical universe, in the Brazilian vernacular. For Lygia Pape there is no distinction between figuration and abstraction, between rationality and expression, between corporality and conceptuality. Everything is swallowed up in the anthropophagic vortex of Brazilian culture and everything can be regurgitated as long as sensuality appears intelligently on the surface of the skin.
This erotics of the concept is present in all the moments of her course, from the way she appropriates the languages of abstraction in order to convert them into a grammar of colour, which will soon be combined with text in her paintings and sculptures, as will be developed in many different forms throughout the seventies and eighties.
At the end of the nineties Lygia Pape made a series of works around the memory of Tupinambá, the great federation of native tribes that occupied the Brazilian coast. Red is the colour that unites these works, sometimes feathers also, in the case of the sculptures or the installations. In a painted photograph this dense, bloody red appears as a mantle, or a cloud that covers Rio de Janeiro. In a poem from the same time, Pape wrote:

what mantle?
what mantle
TUPINAMBÁ
h ere
soft peñas
red
blood-red

in
grilled
rituals

GUARÁ
in
CUNHAMBÉBE

in
shoulder
fan-peña-flight

anthropophagic
mind

swallows
spirit and flesh

TOGETHER

It is this anthropophagic union that this table celebrates. It is this erotics of the flesh that is also of the spirit, steeped in the deep history of Brazil, knowing that its specific condition is its universality.
There is a deep anthropology in Pape’s work.

Delfim Sardo