History

"Young painting intended to be independent, controversial, inventive, denunciatory, critical, social, moral. It drew its inspiration both from immediately surrounding urban nature as well as from life itself with its daily cult of myths". With these words, the dealer and journalist Ceres Franco announced the exhibition Opinião 65 [Opinion 65], organised by her and by the gallery owner Jean Boghici. A part of the 4th Centenary celebrations of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the show occupied the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), from 12 August to 12 September, 1965, bringing together 29 artists, including 13 Europeans and 16 Brazilians. The central idea of the organisers was to establish a counterpoint between national and foreign output so as to evaluate the degree to which Brazilian art was contemporary, on the basis of the recent researches into new figurations. The neofigurative tendencies present in the international panorama throughout the 1960s arrived in the country through exhibitions of the French nouvelle figuration and the Argentine otra figuración, between 1961 and 1966. Among these, the collective show of the School of Paris at the Relevo gallery in 1964, owned by Franco and Boghici, marked the establishment of closer and more systematic relations between the French and Brazilian avant-gardes, which reached their high point in the Opinião 65 show.

Coined by the critic Michel Ragon, in 1961, the term nouvelle figuration aimed to designate the return to figuration, in which the free treatment of the figure was observed, outside realist and descriptive moulds, on the basis of lessons drawn from Informalism, from Abstract Expressionism and from Pop Art. The exhibitions of 1961 and 1962 at the Mathias Fels gallery in Paris, presented the new tendencies. These brought together not only young French artists but also members of the Grupo CoBrA [CoBrA Group], in addition to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Enrico Baj (1924-2003), Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Robert Lapoujade (1921-1993), Roberto Matta (1911-2002), and others. The Paris Biennale of 1963, in turn brought together European Neofigurativists such as Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005) and René Bertholo (1935-2005), the Argentine Antonio Seguí (1934- ), as well as the English Pop Art of David Hockney (1937- ).

The 1964 exhibition Mitologias Cotidianas [Daily Mythologies] defined the directions of the new figuration in progress with greater clarity, with this also termed figuration narrative, and which sought, as the title itself suggested, to move closer to daily life in its multiple dimensions, through a language which appealed to the grotesque and fantastic. It was during the Mitologias Cotidianas exhibition that Ceres Franco selected the eighteen artists who would be included in the Relevo gallery show, including the French artists Gilles Aillaud (La Route la Nuit, 1962) and Michel Parré (1938) (Maternité, 1964), the Argentine Antonio Berni (1905-1981) with the canvas Toreador (1964) and the Brazilian resident in Paris, Flavio-Shiró (1928- ). The aim of the exhibition, according to the curator, was to bring Brazilian art and the Brazilian public closer to the new artistic experiments consisting of operations of fragmentation and juxtaposition of images and decomposition of movements in the treatment of current and controversial themes, referring to the social and political scene.

The impact of the new figurative languages on Brazilian art was immediate, above all among artists in Rio de Janeiro, such as Antonio Dias (1944- ), Carlos Vergara (1941- ), Rubens Gerchman (1942 - 2008), Roberto Magalhães (1940- ), Ivan Freitas (1932- ) and Ângelo de Aquino (1945- ), who took part in Opinião 65. The exhibition included various styles and tendencies, brought together by the resumption of the figurative image. As Ceres Franco stated, by way of a summary twenty years later: "Opinião 65 had representatives of all tendencies, but the painted figurative image was the one that dominated at the time". The exhibition included works by the English artist Wright Royston Adzak (1927- ); the Argentines Antonio Berni and Jack Vanarsky; the Spaniards Manuel Calvo (1934- ) and José Paredes Jardiel; the French artists Gérard Tisserand (1934- ) and Alain Jacquet (1939- ); among many others. In addition to those mentioned above, the Brazilian contingent included Pedro Escosteguy (1916-1989), Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), Ivan Serpa (1923-1973), José Roberto Aguilar (1941- ) and Adriano de Aquino (1946- ).

The label 'new figuration' appears to be sufficiently broad to cover the majority of the works presented, as the critic Paulo Sérgio Duarte points out, but it did not take account of the diversity of lines and works present in the show. The works of Carlos Vergara, for example, allow a strong Expressionist tone to be glimpsed, which he learned in his classes with Iberê Camargo (1914-1994). The works by Flávio Império (1935-1985), as well as the Parangolés by Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), also clash with the whole, due to their use of languages close to choreography and environmental art. In any case, themes linked to urban issues and mass culture appeared to predominate in the exhibition, in addition to social and cultural criticism. The impact of Opinião 65 may be inferred from its critical reception at the time (e.g. the acclamatory texts that Ferreira Gullar (1930- ) and Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981) wrote on it in Cadernos da Civilização Brasileira, No. 4, 1965, and Jornal do Comércio, 1966, respectively) and by other subsequent exhibitions, considered to be its direct result: Opinião 66 [Opinion 66] (Rio de Janeiro), Propostas 66 [Proposals 66] (São Paulo), Vanguarda Brasileira [Brazilian Avant-Garde] (Belo Horizonte, 1966), as well as the collective show Nova Objetividade Brasileira [New Brazilian Objectivity] (Rio de Janeiro, 1967).