Rio de Janeiro poetic realism: 19' and 20' centuries Gustavo Dall'ara and Jorge Eduardo

The strength of realistic painting and also its Achilles' heel, are in its own objectivity. With a discreet "kitchen", it keeps the spectator distant, opposed to the painting which from Impressionism on, invited him to finish the picture with it. However, the obstination with which the realistic painter conducts his objectivity from general to particular, the nearly fetishistic respect for the whims of Reality, the attachment to detail, end up involving the spectator (when facing a real picture), who can thus penetrate this mirror which is the picture (as in the mirrors of Cocteau's films), in the magic world of realistic painting.

The German painters from the New Objectivity (Neue sachlichkeit), rejecting the dishevelled subjetivism of Expressionism, and blaming it for all the evils in the defeated Germany of the twenties, took up the naked and raw reality of the streets as models, and called themselves Magic Realists.

Magic... This power from demiurges, from saints and creators, of disorganizing Reality, of endowing the things and the beings with the gift of ubiquity...

John Estes, the greatest American Hyper Realist, is a magician iri composing reflexes, playing with glasses and mirrors, with which he fools the spectator, once calling him to the reality of his picture, once taking him hack to street routine. These reflections, to continue the metaphor, surfaced before the pictures of Gustavo Dall'Ara's and Jorge Eduardo's, who apart in time (nearly one hundred years), have the same love for Reality and the same passion for the exclusive model: Rio de Janeiro city.

Dall'Ara arrived here still young; born Venetian, as his fellow citizens Canaletto and Belloto, he had the same taste for well erected walls, for surprising people in the streets and on the squares of his cities. Like Canaletto, he preferred to direct his love such as binoculars to a gutter pipe, a piece of paper thrown in the street, a peddler passing before a wall cut by the noon sunlight, indifferent to critics, who found his painting "documentary and cold (without emotions)".

This light also involved his fellow photographers, with whom he certainly lived in newspaper home offices, which constantly published his illustrations and drawings.

On the turn of the century, Photographic Art finds its highest zenith in Mark Ferrez, and Photography in general is already part of the "Carioca" routine. In spite of' the non-existence of concrete facts to prove the involvement of Dall'Ara with Photography, it is difficult to deny this influence, when photographic view is evident in some of his pictures.

As a matter of fact, since the invention of Photography, the painters followed its steps closely. The most famous picture of Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, is a photographic snapshot.

Nowadays, wandering around what was left from old Rio (through the Cultural Corridor), is like walking along with Dall'Ara, re-making with him the path of his pictures.

Jorge Eduardo gathers up the debris from the world which Dall'Ara painted. A window, a door, saved from destruction and forgetfulness, are fetishes for him, starting points which the artist's intuition will open to other eyes and other skies. To capture these new spaces, he uses a camera: but it does not compete with the painter, it is his Shiva, "the third eye of the Hindus", with which the painter controls the objectivity of his own eyes, an instrument like the pencil and the brush, a commodity like the oil painting of the Van Eyck Brothers'. Realist, and "pour cause", he knows how to play with the sunlight on almond tree branches, even if its reflections fall, in elaborate ornates, just below car hoods'. To Léger, a yellow bulldozer gleaming in the sun, was more beautiful than the art from museums. At the warm nights of Rio, from building rooftops, the advertient signs repeat their coloured dives in the calm waters of the Guanabara Bay. As a "Bossa Nova" song, Jorge Eduardo's Rio is beautiful...

One of these days, passing by his studio, a new picture attracted my attention. A big and dense tree from behind the wall of a Gloria street. The rhythm of the balustrade was as if interrupted by blank canvas, and he told me it would be left so, as an imaginary statue which the pottery tree branches seamed to crown, drawing at the same time the contour of the Great Absent, who will go on living while there is a piece of wall, a fence, a stone in this city: Pedro Nava.

Jean Boghici
Rio de Janeiro, November 23'", 1984.