ArtReview96

Mônica Nadorby Claire Rigby

Despite what you read in the newspapers, art isn’t all about the money. At least not for one pioneering

artist who abandoned the market and took to the streets, bringing the residents of a down-at-heel

São Paulo district with her for the ride

September 2015 97

Mônica Nador lives at the end of the line. And then some. Reaching jamac, the community arts space that she founded in 2004 and that doubles as her home, involves a metro ride to Jabaquara, the last stop on the north–south, Linha 1–Azul line, followed by a 6km taxi ride to the bairro of Jardim Miriam, deep in south São Paulo’s vast urban sprawl. Along the way, the city’s concrete jungle skyline dwindles into an arid, low-lying concrete scrubland, and as we draw closer to jamac, the taxi driver frets about motorbike bandits and general thievery in Jardim Miriam, a neighbourhood in which more robberies were reported in December 2014 than in any other part of São Paulo.

Near a busy high-street dotted with shops and spit-and-sawdust bars, the Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (jamac), an independent commu-nity art-hub and arts-based adult-education centre, lies behind a wall adorned with panel after panel of vividly colourful, hand-stencilled patterns. Inside, through a green door and past a long, sunny patio lined with workbenches, the artist is drinking coffee at a table in her spartan living space: a covered patio with a tiny bedroom leading off it, and a small kitchen and lavatory that are also used by the students who come to jamac for courses in stencil, screenprinting and film-making. The Saturday-morning cinema workshop is starting up as we speak, and some of the students drift in to greet Nador with a kiss.

She first came to the neighbourhood in 2002 to carry out a set of wall paintings, one of a series of such pro- jects she has been taking into Brazilian communities for almost 20 years, helping residents to develop their own motifs and patterns, create their own stencils and de- corate their homes, schools, parks, hospi-tals and streets with swathes of colourful patterning. ‘What the artist is offering’, curator Ivo Mesquita has said of Nador ‘is the possibility to realise the contem-porary practice of painting as a borderless, hierarchy-free territory.’ Referring to one of the first of such projects, in 1998 in Nilo Peçanha, northeastern Brazil, in which the artist asked residents to paint a wall with images representative of local culture – masks and drums were recurring motifs – Nador wrote, ‘I thought the public should play a larger role. After all, those people would definitely not need one more “foreigner” showing off their wisdom and talent as opposed to their own local misery and ignorance.’

Explaining the decision not only to put down roots in the form of jamac, but also to move to Jardim Miriam herself, Nador tells me that she “became tired of doing projects, forging connections, and then just leaving again…I wanted to stay close to Brazil and Brazilians, but I felt very distanced from that inside the mainstream art circuit.” In São Paulo, much of the talk in the artworld was of exhibitions and events in farflung places like London, Madrid, Tokyo and Dhaka, she says. “But no one seemed to want to set foot in the places, here in Brazil, where people actually live.”

Prior to the founding of jamac, in a display of the kind of radical social empathy that appears, says Nador, to have gone out of fashion these days, she and a small group of kindred spirits – architects, artists, urbanists – initiated a long period of discussion with Jardim Miriam residents and activists, among them feminists, militant metal- workers and members of Brazil’s landless movement, Movimento Sem Terra. The meetings moved, step by step, towards a vision of what might most benefit

the community in terms of art and culture, and settled on the model of continuing education that jamac embodies to this day, as a non- profit entity running arts-based workshop classes for adults. Funding for jamac comes from various, mainly governmental sources – mostly Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, thanks to jamac’s status, as of 2010, as a ‘Ponto de Cultura’: a designated cultural hub. The centre also makes some income from its wall-painting projects, and Nador adds personal funds to the extent that she is able, “which is not that much.”

Born in 1955, Nador graduated from São Paulo’s elite faap univer-sity in 1983 and quickly found success as a painter, holding her first solo show that same year and taking part in multiple group shows and exhibitions. She was well connected from the start – her father was an art lover, a painter himself and a leading light in local cultural politics; and her contemporaries and friends at faap included some of the most important figures in Brazilian art today, among them Leda Catunda, Jac Leirner, Sérgio Romagnolo, Dora Longo Bahia, Ana Maria Tavares and Leonilson, and the gallerist Luciana Brito, who cur- rently represents Nador.

The landmark 1984 exhibition Como Vai Você, Geração 80? (How are you doing, 80s generation?), held at the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, featured works by Nador, Tavares, Catunda,

Leonilson and Romagnolo, among many others, including Beatriz Milhazes, whose exuberant canvases are now among the most highly valued of any living Brazilian artist. While Milhazes’s work, recalls Nador, already showed a highly decora-tive bent, featuring cherubs and curli-cues, Nador showed a series of dark, dense large-scale graphite drawings, Campos (Fields). In her Campo 6 (1983), a multitude

of short, insistent lines surge across the paper in tight-packed, system-atic columns; a dark mass that seems lit from behind by a soft, insistent glow made by minuscule gaps between the strokes.

These stormy works subsided as Nador moved into a mid-to-late- 1980s period of painting warm, richly colourful works like those in the series Um Bom e Velho Monocromático (A Good Old Monochrome, 1989), in which fields of colour, often built from rough, jerkily gestural strokes, are bordered by neatly patterned, painted ‘frames’. In the series Para Orar (To Pray), and A Arte (The Art), also from the late 80s, Nador demonstrates a growing interest in Islamic imagery, incorpo-rating shapes and motifs reminiscent of the style, and creating sump-tuously toned forms, mandalalike, that twist and swirl like dervishes. Nador’s initial interest in the style was sparked when she was treated for a medical condition in a house decorated with Turkish forms and motifs. Contemplating an ornate ceiling with beautiful plaster mould-ings that had been painted beige, spoiling the work, Nador began to explore “chromatic solutions” for the ceiling, and soon found traces of Islamic-style art infiltrating her own work. “I became interested in what for me became the loveliest expression of human culture – a kind of true excellence in artistic expression.”

Her discovery of the style’s ornate, harmonious forms also coincided with a sea change in her spirits. As we leaf through the pages of a book

about her work, Nador halts at the dense black mass of Campo 6. “That’s the way I was,” she says. She flips forward to A Arte (1988), an ornate, surging mandala

facing page Para Meca, 1989,acrylic on canvas, 200 × 150 cm.

Courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

“I wanted to stay close to Brazil and Brazilians, but I felt very distanced

from that inside the mainstream art circuit… no one seemed to want

to set foot in the places, here in Brazil, where people actually live”

ArtReview98

both images  jamac, São Paulo, 2015. Courtesy Claire Rigby

September 2015 99

in shades of pink and blue: “This is what I became.” The change, she says, was due to her discovery of Rolfing, an alternative medical treat-ment focusing on hands-on bodywork and movement training, which marked a turning point in her life as well as in her art. “There was a before,” she says, “and there was an after.” The ‘before’ included many years of bulimia and depression, the latter still present but kept at bay at different times by remedies including complementary medicine, Prozac and assiduous use of marijuana. “It helps me find my axis, and stops me acting neurotically,” she says. “It helps me to be here.”

Being in Jardim Miriam has never been simple for Nador, and it isn’t simple now, ten years on. From inside her bedroom, where two cats are snoozing the day away, a small window looks through into the main workshop, and we stand and peer through for a moment, watching the film class in full swing, unseen. “These days, I sometimes feel like I’ve become superfluous,” she says. “I’m not even sure whether I still need to be here.”

Nador has repeatedly set herself rigorous challenges. In 1995 she began a masters degree at eca-usp, the University of São Paulo School of Communications and Art, under the tutelage of the artist Regina Silveira, who introduced her to the 1981 essay ‘The End of Painting’ by the us art-historian Douglas Crimp. In it, Crimp asks, ‘To what end painting in the 1980s?’, casting the medium and those who cham-pion and profit from it as ‘reactionary’ in contrast to art practices of the 1960s and 70s, which, Crimp wrote, ‘abandoned painting and coherently placed in ques-tion the ideological supports of painting, and the ideology which painting, in turn, supports’. Profoundly affected by the text, Nador herself abandoned painting. “It paralysed me,” she says. Her artistic practice was, she realised, being chan-nelled into a system that worked to create artificial constructs around it, aimed at “proving I was a ‘real artist’. I felt like my creativity was being diverted, only to be buried. I didn’t want to connive with my class in that process.”

Nador didn’t paint another canvas for the next ten years; and yet in 1996, following a commission to create a wall painting at São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, she alit on the idea of creating large-scale works as part of a group. For Nador, the remedy for the death of the author/painter, and for the futility of the market-driven art machine, became shared authorship and the creation of socially useful art. She spent the next few years carrying out wall-painting projects in commu-nities in São Paulo.

In the main workshop space at jamac, where the film workshop is still underway, Nador reaches into a rack to pull out bolt after bolt of hand-printed fabric, made in jamac’s workshops. She whispers the stories behind the motifs covering the rolls of cloth, some of them printed on various swatches, in multiple formations and colour combinations. A turtle motif swarms a length of chocolate-brown and midnight-blue fabric, and is strewn across a cream swatch in dreamy greys and pinks. It was created by an older woman, says Nador. “She wanted to draw a turtle,” she says, “but she’s illiterate, and had never been taught how to hold a pencil. It took her ages, but she managed it.” Other fabrics are decorated with stylised trees, fruits, drums and abstract patterns. They are beautiful, bold, exquisitely coloured and skilfully printed.

What about her own work – does she still make paintings of her own, beyond the works made collectively during jamac’s projects and workshops? Nador crosses to a long, low cabinet and comes back with two beautiful lithographs made during a 2014 residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A stylised house motif discernible in one was, she says, made at Tamarind the previous year by a resident from Botswana. Does it matter that the motif was created by someone else? Is some level of shared authorship an ines-capable part of her work now? She finds the question odd. “I liked the image,” she says. “I’ve always used other elements – Islamic patterns, and so on. They’re ready. They’re beautiful. I don’t feel the need to make a new one. That’s the way it appears to me, it’s the choice I make. We live with what’s possible.” She laughs, then looks serious again. “If I was doing any other job,” she says, “I’d be mad.”

She would paint more, she says, “But my work doesn’t sell. I can’t understand why. A gallerist once told me, ‘Everyone knows that it’s the artist who really does the selling.’ So as well as making the work, I have to sell it as well, and still give half to them? I can’t seem to relate to gallerists.” Nevertheless, barely a year goes by without Nador’s work being shown in a major exhibition of some description. Over the years, she has shown her work at most of São Paulo’s major institutions and galleries, including at Galeria Vermelho, Galeria Luisa Strina,

Casa Triângulo and her home gallery, Luciana Brito; at the mac, the mam, the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the Pinacoteca and masp – the city’s major institutional players; and at the biennales of Sydney (2004), Havana (2000), São Paulo (1983, 1991, 2006) and Gwangju (2012). She will travel to Puerto Rico to take part in the iv Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial, and a shared-authorship exhibition of her

work and jamac’s was held in January at Paço das Artes, a gallery inside the University of São Paulo. She is also currently working on a project in central São Paulo, leading a team to unearth decorative elements from a stunning, semiderelict 1920s mansion, part of the Vila Itororó complex, which is in the process of becoming a new cultural hub.

We linger over a set of lithographs she and others made the previous day, in which an abstract pattern is printed first in dusty brown, then the paper turned 90 degrees and the pattern overlaid again in a rich cerise. The juxtaposition of the shapes and colours in one particular print is spectacular, resonating with the perfection of a two-part harmony. Nador stares at it, transfixed. “It’s magic when this happens. This is why we do it, this is the reason for the patterns in Islamic art – it’s how the universal order works. It’s searching for God, it’s a matter of mathematics, it’s a way to align your head,” she says. It’s clear, also, that art has been Nador’s way of trying to align far more than her own head. Having first used it to explore darkness and then a lighter, more optimistic brightness, she has carried it along with her all the way, from what felt like the art market’s betrayal of her creativity into a transform-ative, deeply committed present day, pressing it into action in order to enact social change. Everyone has convictions; few possess the courage to live them. Deep in Jardim Miriam, a speck on the map in South America’s largest metropolis, Nador is quietly doing just that. ar

Mônica Nador’s work is included in the iv Poly/Graphic San Juan, Triennial, 24 October – 27 February

Nador didn’t paint another canvas for the next ten years; and yet in 1996,

following a commission to create a wall painting at São Paulo’s Museum

of Modern Art, she alighted on the idea of working as part of a group

Tamar Guimarães