Laymert Garcia dos Santos

Partenheimer and the drawing of drawing

[I] Whether European, Chinese or Brazilian, art critics and commentators of Partenheimer’s work often point to the meditative, aerial, carefree, imaginative and even lyrical nature of his drawings and paintings, never failing to mention the enigmatic balance which makes his work and the silence that appears to inhabit it so highly recognizable (consider the Roman Diary, Carmen, De Coloribus, and Zur Grammatik series or Die fragilen…

Bio-information and Latin American Art – A Provocation

The “cybernetic shift” that has been giving growing relevance since the 1960s to information (digital and/or genetic) in all spheres of human activity in order to reconfigure our understanding of life, work and knowledge, does not yet seem to have managed to trigger off in artists an awareness of the radical change of perspective it requires. Indeed, anyone frequenting contemporary art exhibitions and wishing to compare…

Lorenzato, the grandeur of modesty

Amedeo Luciano Lorenzato is a unique artist within the setting of Brazilian plastic art. Virtually unknown outside his home state of Minas Gerais, the region where he was born and where he created his vast collection of works, he is however, one of the best 20th Century Brazilian painters, and his importance should and needs to be recognised and appraised. Lorenzato is pure painting – this is how he is quite fairly defined by Maria Angélica Melendi, in the book that was dedicated to him and published in 2011.

Projections of the Forest-Land: The Yanomami Image-Drawing

The Yanomami drawings are, literally, extraordinary. For aesthetic criteria, but also, and mainly, for their intriguing and mysterious character, when we stop to think about how and by whom they are made. The images that the reader-viewer can appreciate in the preceding and following pages constitute a small sampling from the collections of Carlo Zacquini and Claudia Andujar, two tireless defenders of the Yanomami territory and…

AMAZONAS – A theater-music in three parts

This page is a record of the opera Amazon - Music Theatre in Three Parts production process and presents my reflection on such cross-cultural experiment. The project had Artist's conception of Peter Ruzicka, Peter Weibel, Laymert Garcia dos Santos; Consulting Bruce Albert, David Kopenawa, Siegfried Mauser; Initiative Joachim Bernauer, José Wagner Garcia. By SESC São Paulo, Goethe Institute, Munich Biennale (Ale), ZKM | Center for Art…

AMAZONAS – A theater-music in three parts – second part

Having defined a general framework that provided parameters for the creators, we began dealing with the work itself, or rather, with how it was to be staged. Officially, the opera Amazonas was categorized as Theater-Music for reasons specific to the musical world of Munich, which reserves the term “opera” for a very specific segment of contemporary operatic works. Among ourselves, however, we always knew we were working on a contemporary multimedia opera called Amazonas.

Becoming Other Being Oneself: Francis Alÿs Inside the Borderline

Were it possible to sum up the work of Francis Alÿs in a very few words, it might be said that it consists of [the] drawing [of] a line. In fact, many are the works in which the drawing of a line emerges as a decisive, foundational factor. Without pretense of exhausting examples – or even systems – about this, one need only recall the line…

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