Leituras, Biblioteca Mário de Andrade
curated by Lilia Schwarcz
(March 23—June 16, 2024)
Artist Thiago Honório’s Leituras [Readings] is an exhibition with books and on books, held in a library, a sort of pantheon of books.
Synthetic, silent and poetic, Leituras means a tribute to books, but also to an aesthetic of books.
Its venue is almost self-referential or even metalinguistic: the iconic Mário de Andrade Library, an institution whose primary calling is associated to São Paulo modernism, though not limited by it.
The exhibition also represents a sort of abstract of Thiago Honório's consistent and coherent work. It shows the artist’s 20-year production from 2003 to 2023 and his dialogue with the baroque of his native Minas Gerais and with São Paulo modernism — the time and places he selected to analyze Brazil.
Composed of 18 works, Leituras invites us to think of the book as matter, as accumulated knowledge, as a “flammable substance” (as the artist likes to define it) and as an aesthetic form.
The show also celebrates the 130th anniversary of Mário de Andrade’s birth. The modernist writer's production appears in nine of the artist's works – Estudo para Leituras [Study for Readings], Leituras, Paulicea [São Paulo City], Tarsivaldo, Tarsivaldo I, II and III and Memorando [Memorandum]. In addition, the exhibition gathers works created in a dialogue with Mário de Andrade, with the textual and visual production of writers and artists such as Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, Flávio de Carvalho, Antonio Candido, Manuel Bandeira and Michel Foucault.
Finally, Leituras includes works that became books produced with more generous editions and print runs, such as {[()]}, Augusta and DULCINÉIA, a collaboration with Dulcinéia Catadora, the paper picking women’s collective from the Glicério neighborhood.
This is therefore an exhibition that resignifies books and works by critics and artificers of São Paulo modernism, crossing content with form and narrative with aesthetics, thus articulating themes from contemporary art itself. Lastly, and to begin with, Leituras calls for a reflection on the content of books, as explosive as it is inaugural; it is an invitation directed to the enchanting power of these narratives, now translated as pure form, concept and art.
Lilia Schwarcz
Curator
WORKsAugusta Express, 2003
Augusta, 2003-2017
Marcador, 2008-2019
Pau-Brasil, 2014
Equações possíveis, 2016-2018
Ponta de lança, 2015
Brigada ligeira, 2015
{[( )]}, 2016
A vontade de saber, 2012-2017
DULCINÉIA, 2017
Leituras, 2015-2018
Leituras [vídeo], 2018-2023
Miolo, 2018-2020
Ouro Preto, 2018-2022
Paulicéia, 2018-2024
Paulicéia [vídeo], 2018-2024
Memorando, 2020
Tarsivaldo III, 2017-2022
textsOn readings and calls for entries: coherence and poetry in the work of Thiago Honório, Lilia Schwarcz and Thiago Honório