The dream of ingenuousness

The experience of serving on an artistic jury, for any sort of art, can be doubly revealing: while on the one hand it creates an index for the artistic production at a determined place and time, it also winds up enunciating the jury members’ convictions and ideals, which are not always followed to the letter by the artists.

Taking the Bienal Naïfs do Brasil, held by SESC São Paulo for more than 22 years, as a basis for considering these questions allows for some thoughts about the current so-called naive or ingenuous art scene in Brazil. An initial reflection reveals a certain dissonance between the original term and its connotation nowadays; created in what to us seems like the faraway 19th century to define, from the European point of view, a countless number of productions by artists lacking classical and academic training — in short, from a popular origin — the expression “naive art” came to be associated with a universe of creation in which a certain feigned style was overlaid to what was previously a poetic expression.

In this sense, one cannot intend to frame the term as a purist reflection of production that escapes from the tentacles of mass communication or the codes of the art market — well-known collateral effects of our globalized world.

But the challenge, precisely because we know the power of our artistic traditions linked to popular roots, is this: while acting on a commission formed for this specific task, how can we escape from the desire to encounter a genuine freshness that represents the essence of a certain ambivalent practice, that lies outside any stereotype while also not representing a mere mimicry of false values of Brazilian culture? And, on the other hand, how can we get away from the preconceived idea that the “ingenuous” artist necessarily lives in isolation from the codes of this contemporary world — as though his/her work were not a legitimate expression of it?

These seem to have been two important questions that drove the reflections and choices of the present commission. From among the many artworks entered, we were able to select an interesting portrait of Brazil which, in the last decades, has gone through significant changes of a political and economic order, in certain ways captured by the artistic representations observed. These changes did not necessarily favor the exercise of art — yet they have certainly revealed subtexts still present in the national mindset in regard to the universe of naive art, in which there persists an old idea of ingenuousness, dreamed of for more than a century.

The enlargement of understandings about ingenuous, popular and contemporary art — and, moreover, the approximation among their fields of creation — has entailed a ceaseless search by the Bienal Naïfs do Brasil at each edition, in tune with SESC’s commitment toward encouraging Brazilian artistic production and debate. In 2012, this path assumed clearer outlines. Our desire is for the public to find inspiration in the simple and the colorful, the mundane and the oneiric, because this is how the naive art was revealed to us, the members of the selection commission, throughout a delightful time of research and debates.