An   Heraclitean   life   and   work   project                                    Olívio Tavares de Araújo
São Paulo, 2000

Fifteen years ago, writing about Vlavianos’ sculpture, I have invented an equation that even became the title to the text: "Vlavianos today = Vlavianos always". Though we

know that in modern science, new discoveries and theories afford new readings of phenomena, it is also true that our desire for stability and exactness is delighted with the fact that this does not alter the veracity and/or the operationality of some former formulations. In short, in spite of the quantic mechanics, of the infra-atomic physics and Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminibility, it is good to know that Earth still revolves around the Sun and that the square of the hypothenuse continues to be equal to the sum of the squares of the cathets.

And that Vlavianos today is the same Vlavianos always. There are, certainly, in his last ten or fifteen years productions, thematic and formal modifications, because the artist continues in action. But beneath all this the same problems, the same questions, the same world vision and a wish for integration and completeness are established, displayed in a search of a systematic adjustment of some dicotomies and oppositions. It is worth to remember that Vlavianos comes from the country of light and reason, of lógos, of paidéia, of areté, of kalokagathia, of so many humanistic values, revealing an antropocentric and harmonic conception of universe, but also the nocturnal side, the Nachtsseite, exhumed by Nietzsche from the depth of the "Greek miracle". Ancient Greece was much more complex than the high-school history books may suggest. There was cruelty and slavery. On that was built the leisure, necessary, according to Aristotle himself, so one can be able to philosophize. Plato’s most beautiful ideas florished on individual suffering. Greek temples did not have the whiteness they possess today and that we imagined as the result of a wish for cleaness. They were painted in strong, dramatic colours, blues, ochers, dark reds. They became white, of course, due to twenty centuries of rains.

But let’s get back to my thesis: in 1966 already, Mário Pedrosa, presenting a Vlavianos’ exhibit at the MAM (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio, pointed out in his work a duel between "form and non-form", regarding the co-existence and/or alternation, in his works, of a constructivistic aspect, of geometric character, and another, organic and expressive. Pedrosa exemplified the first one with the "riveted and screwed structures, distributed at regular intervals, remarkably introduced in piled up mortars of his materials, and the second, with "the parts put together by chance, resulting, so to say, involuntary or uncontrolled from pieces of iron", that would still give way to the "moment in which the artist, in the sculptor, surrenders to his inner demon".

I don’t know whether there was in him anything involuntary, nor would I speak today of an "inner demon, since in the light of the years and his later production, it seems to me quite sure that Vlavianos is much more Apollinean than Dyonisian (to use the Nietzschean dichotomy that also comes from ancient Greece); but Pedrosa does it much more in the Greek sense of daimon, that inner fire that compels to creation and expresses itself in it. Our sculptor’s manifests itself since then through a dialogue between the constructed and the sensitive, as was also pointed out by Walter Zanini and Mário Chamie, in texts of the seventies. The first talks of "interaction of rigid and octogonal forms and informal textures", the second of a "counterpoint between the geometric and the organic, between mechanic and vital, between reason and intuition, between real and virtual".

This is what describes Vlavianos up-to-date. With maturity, it is true that the relationship, at the same time, loving and conflicting, that bound him to his material (and permitted Pedrosa to mention its "pressure"), became more friendly and tender. Instead of the kneaded and oxidated iron plate of the past, stainless steel and the steel plate are soft in his hands, polished, most of the time brilliant, conveying a cooler message. Without ever having been truely abstract — always dealing with three thematic groups: imaginary machines, plants and the human fugure —, his work became less and less literal, except for momentary incursions, like those thar suggest domestic utensils, though "belonging" to the nucleus of trunks and lianes. The search for conciliating opposites is more subtle, but it remains. Certain forms grow in organized way, but with the festive vitality of leaves that climb the branches. They oppose themselves and complete themselves, symbolizing the natural world and transposing the purely intellectual to a geometric form.

With maturity, Vlavianos was also becoming — without ever leaving or excluding the other pole — a more geometric sculptor than before. In this consists surely his personal answer, his way of being within two realities, one Brazilian, the other Latin-American, that came to involve him in his new country. Since the seventies one talks insistently of a "constructivist calling" of Latin America, trying to emphasize the undeniable good quality of the production of this type of artists, in the different Spanish speaking countries and in ours. It might seem surprising and contradictory, within an undisciplined, hot, ecosystem and culture, supposedly expressive, before anything else, but seeming exactly a reaction to the tropical entropy, an attempt to resist to it and ordering itself. On the other side, one also talks much, in Brazil, of "sensitive geometry", one that is not born of formulae and rules, like the one of orthodox concretists, but of intuitive decisions, like (as a model) Volpi’s. It is not without reason that the best Brazilian sculpture of the century tended in that direction — like Lygia Clark, at the time of the "bichos" ("animals"), Amilcar de Castro, Sérgio Camargo, Franz Weissmann, Sérvulo Esmeraldo — and for no other reason did Vlavianos follow this path.

But he followed it in his own way. "We are used to recognize his works to the slightest contact", wrote Walter Zanini, in 1993. The Greek-Brazilian sculptor manages to be, at the same time, unmistakable and original. He is neither a purist, nor a thesis’ illustrator, nor an apostle. His language remains contrary to any rule (unless, of course, the intrinsic rules each work proposes in itself, for its own solution) and it does not resemble any other artist’s, in Brazil or outside the country. That is not a small praise, especially in a country where even talented creators are frequently epigones of their former masters, who were the real inventors of proposals and solutions adopted by their followers. It does not matter if thematically (a term I use here cum grano salis) it deals with the astronauts and hominidae of the seventies, the plants and clouds of the eighties, the machines and musical instruments and paraphrases of domestic utensils of the nineties, Vlavianos always manages so that the same stylistic constants permeate them, the same rivets, screws and screw-nuts, in dialogue with informal trimmings, volumes and reliefs, to discover and impose a harmony of contrasts. It certainly is a project (not formulated but I believe it is conscious), very pre-socratic Greece, very Heraclitean: to harmonize opposites, or better still — discover that they include each other mutually.

This has also been grasped very clearly outside Brazil and facing a smaller sampling, but sufficiently clear and emphatic. The historian Joan Marter, in the catalogue of the 1948 exhibit in New York, states that Vlavianos’ sculptures "are filled with the opposition of internal forms and evoke the ever changing processes one finds in every aspect of life". Besides, it is only with life one makes real art and it is just as raw material as marbles, woods, paints and papers, that embody the object. Vlavianos today, as Vlavianos always, navigates in the dangerous sea of living, boarding the dangerous but unavoidable vessel, that is each of his works.


Olívio Tavares de Araújo
São Paulo, 2000

A cinema director, critic of art and curator of several exhibitions, he was an assistant-editor of Veja and IstoÉ magazines, where he published several articles about plastic arts and classical music. Today, he writes occasionally for the newspapers O Estado de S. Paulo and Jornal da Tarde. He has published more than 200 texts in art catalogues and wrote nine books, among them Two studies about Volpi (1986), Looking for Mozart (1991), Brennand (1997) and Silva: the painting, not the novel (1998). Member of the Brazilian Association of Critics of Art (ABCA) and the International Association of Critics of Art (AICA), he was awarded with the Gonzaga Duque Prize for his works about cinema on art (1979) and for the whole of his production (1998).
As cinema director, he made more than 40 documentaries (short and medium footage), most of them about the artistic creation. His best known films are about Volpi, Farnese de Andrade, Siron Franco, Tomie Ohtake, and his videos about Guignard, Maillol, Brennand, Vieira da Silva, Abstractionism in Brazil and Brazilian engraving. His films were shown in Cannes, Nyon and Los Angeles Filmex festivals, among others, and Montreal, Brasília and Gramado, where he was awarded with important prizes.