Artist Showdown

Ivald Granato :: A Multitasking Artist

Ivald Granato: The performer, the visual artist, the sculpturer, the engraver, the vanguard and multitasking artist. For many he is a resteless L’enfant terrible. At the age of 60, he has been active and engaged in the Brazilian and international art scene for the past 40 years. With an endless list of solo shows in Museums and Art Galleries around the globe, he is non stop. For all he has done and for all he has gained, throughout the years, one would guess he ought to rest and live his comfortable life in his amazing house in Brazil or simply spend his money and time traveling around the world. That isn’t far from the truth. However, he has never been able to tame the uncontrollable and restless ranger he actually is. Regardless if he is traveling or is in his sutdio, he is always thinking about new ways of doing things, as well as contradicting the staggered art scene he often calls manipulated and manipulative.

He’s now working on a new show format, actually it’s a 1 day pop-up show where he brings back the flair of the performances he used to do with Helio Otiticica, back in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s called “Parece que foi ontem”, something like ‘It seems like yesterday’.

“When we view Ivald Granato’s paintings, we often get the impression they were made quickly. Some could not have taken more than a day to come to being. That is indeed the truth. They were created in exactly forty years and a day.

Throughout the last forty years, Ivald Granato has been a constant and forceful presence in Brazilian art. During this time he did practically everything an artist can possibly do in the XX and XXI centuries: painting, drawing, sculpture, objects, ceramics, installations, performance, postal art, works in progress, muralism, art books, urban interventions, alternative journalism. It is through such restless and intensely participative activity that one can understand the history of our art simply by observing Granato’s work throughout its course. It is difficult to understand the history of Brazilian art without acknowledging the presence of Ivald Granato.

As an artist, Ivald Granato is gifted with a rare peculiarity. He organizes movement, gesture and energy and his creative process is similar to the result of painting. His ahs a particular method, of energetic impulse and a visceral dive into the construct of the figure. Notice how his figures – the core of his work – convey incessant movement as if the brush had a frenetic life of its own. The figure takes shape without prior drawing, without the need of a single stroke of contour, as it is established by the relationships among the internal pictorial volumes.

Ivald Granato is a gestural artist. Ivald Granato is an artist who immerses himself in the act of creation. For Ivald Granato, the creative gesture is also a body movement, a dance, particular and unique. And paradoxically, Ivald Granato, a member of our vanguard, an icon of the contestation movements and of the pursuit of new languages, is a classicist, given that the manner by which he constructs the figure – through the relationships among internal volumes – is best exemplified by the emblematic work of Paul Cézanne.”

Jacob Klintowitz