* The artwork descriptions are widely supported by the writings of Thiago Honório, whose narrative is a constituent part of said artworks.
** Translator’s note: in Portuguese, livrar means to free up or get rid of, and its present tense form, livro, also means book.
On readings and calls for entries: coherence and poetry in the work of Thiago Honório
(by Lilia Schwarcz and Thiago Honório)*
Leituras (Readings), by the artist Thiago Honório, is an exhibition featuring books, about books, and held in a library; this book pantheon of sorts.
Synthetic, silent, and poetic, Leituras signifies an homage to books, but also an aesthetics of books.
The place it takes place in is almost self-referential, and even metalinguistic: the iconic Mário de Andrade library, an institution whose premier vocation is tied to São Paulo modernism, though not exclusively so.
The exhibit is also a kind of summary of the consistent, coherent work of Thiago Honório. It spans 20 years of output in dialogue with Minas Gerais baroque art and São Paulo modernism from this Minas Gerais artist who selected this time period and locus to think of Brazil.
Composed of 18 artworks executed over a 20-year timespan — from 2003 to 2023 —, Leituras invites us to consider the book as matter, as accumulated knowledge, as “flammable substance,” (as the artist likes to call it) and as aesthetic form.
Additionally, the exhibition celebrates the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mário de Andrade. The modernist writer’s work is featured in 9 different pieces by Honório — Estudo para Leituras (Study for Readings, 2015), Leituras (Readings, 2015/2018), Paulicéia (2018/2023), Tarsivaldo (2017), Tarsivaldo I, II, III, (2017/2022) and Memorando (Memorandum, 2020). Moreover, the exhibit features work developed in dialogue with Mário de Andrade as well as with textural and visual work from writers and artists such as: Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, Flávio de Carvalho, Antonio Candido, Manuel Bandeira, and Michel Foucault.
Lastly, Leituras features creations that became published books with more generous print runs, such as: {[( )]}, Augusta, and DULCINÉIA, created in collaboration with the Glicério neighborhood paper-picking women’s collective, Dulcinéia Catadora (Dulcinéia, the Picker).
We know that Mário de Andrade Library, opened in 1925, is the biggest public library in the city of São Paulo, and one of the most influential and iconic in the country. Not only does Leituras converge with that institution’s mission and role of spreading literature and art, but it also aligns with the principles, values, and tireless endeavors of its founder: Mário de Andrade.
As we will see, each artwork reassesses the possibilities in its own way, and allegorically converses with the outer bounds of modernism.
An immense laser-cut ribbon was made in special, gigantic size, much different than the standard, commonly available haberdashery fare. Its tip was cut into a triangular shape – like in books and gift wrapping. Using special satin looms, the piece of fabric was turned into an 8-meter-tall, 70-centimeter-wide Marcador (Marker). Due to its format and magnitude, the artwork converses with other procedures and drawings which explore extraordinary scales.
Between July and August 2019, the artwork was exhibited at Estación Garzón, a train station in Uruguay, whose façade with a glass entrance and a pediment harks back to art deco style. Here, the piece conversed with the translucence of the glass.
In the exhibit, it takes on an allegorical tone, its size and prominence harking back to the importance of the reading process, marked by a temporality that calls for time and interruption. On the other hand, the marker, as its title states, marks the activity itself. And recalls it.
In 2002, Honório moved into an apartment with a view of Augusta Street, in a section of the street known for its highly sought-after saunas, concert and strip venues, nightclubs bars, small tenements, mom-and-pops, and myriad other local establishments. And thus, Augusta was born.
Augusta was first glimpsed from out of the apartment’s kitchen window and laundry room sill. The vibration from the street would invade the private space, imposing itself as an inside marked by an outside.
The first stage of the project consisted of taking notes, making drawings and maps, creating records, making sketches, and writing down the names and street numbers of the establishments. However, one statement captured the artist’s attention. “I write in order to erase my name.” The sentence contains a paradoxical function of erasure: it documents and silences.
In 2003, the idea came up to publish a book initially titled Augusta, and later on, Augusta Express. Fourteen years later, Augusta returned — as a street, a project, an artwork, a book, a name, a character, a form of synthesis of the whole experience. In 2017, a book made of wrapping paper, composed of printed-out numbers and names, under the name-title Augusta, was finally published. That book and its 2003 matrix-of-sorts, Augusta Express, are now featured in the Leituras exhibit.
The piece Pau-Brasil (Brazilwood, 2014) is structured around the pau-brasil wood profile as portrayed in the eponymous book by Oswald de Andrade, in the exact spot where the book’s title had originally been.
First published in 1925, Pau Brasil features a stylized Brazilian flag on its cover. The publication comprises poems aligned with the philosophy and the challenges posed by the 1922 Modern Art Week and the thinking outlined in the 1924 “Pau Brasil Manifesto.”
In turn, Thiago Honório’s artwork features an actual and metaphorical approach to the piece of pau-brasil wood that impales the book. It now represents the material form of cultural intersections that mirror not only the mixture, but above all the cuts, the ruptures, the violences and losses that have been taking place since the colonial era and remained constant in the context of the First Republic, a period in which São Paulo modernism turned into a language, and then a literary canon. In this case, the cut interrupts the modernist consecration and imposes a reflection about the past.
Equações possíveis (Possible equations) consists of an appropriation of the first edition of Flávio de Carvalho’s 1931 book “Experiência nº 2” (Experiment no. 2). It sees the artist present the “performance” he enacted at a Corpus Christi procession in downtown São Paulo. He crossed the procession in the opposite direction than the other participants. The result: he barely escape being lynched by a multitude of devotees angered by his gesture.
In the times we live in, still marked by authoritarian discourse and the exacerbation of a radical evangelical movement, Equações possíveis comes as a harbinger that unites the past into the present. Flávio de Carvalho’s attitude of daring to reverse the flow of the crowd signifies a sensitive, urgent call to break away from the boundaries and dogmas of the times that we live in.
In the piece by Honório, the tome that introduces the performance is laid out on a bible stand purchased at one of the countless religious item and souvenir shops from the Christian “charismatic renewal” movement. Thus exposed, it begs other readings, and new interpretations. It somehow gets desacralized and keeps going against the grain, as did Flávio de Carvalho.
In Ponta de lança (Tip of the spear), an early 20th century Northeast Brazilian dagger is inlaid into the first edition of the eponymous 1945 book by Oswald de Andrade. The dagger’s handle and tip are exposed, while the blade is partly covered up by the book. Thus, a kind of contamination takes place: the adornments in the cover illustration seem to meld perfectly with the ornamental designs on the surface of the metal handle, which portray cangaço-type aesthetics.
Seen in this light, Oswald’s book takes on yet another figuration. The modernist author’s work contains conference transcripts as well as articles published in the newspapers Folha da Manhã, O Estado de S. Paulo, and Diário de São Paulo in 1943 and 1944. Oswald’s critical verve becomes clear in this book. It is interesting to look at the artwork and notice how the cangaço weapon — with its social overtones — matches the critic’s scathing tone. Weapon on weapon; critique on critique.
Brigada ligeira (Swift brigade) features a 20 mm shell casing dating from 1945 inlaid into the first edition of the eponymous book published that same year by the critic Antonio Candido, himself a major champion and proponent of the modernist canon.
Brigada ligeira was the first book by the then-up-and-coming Antonio Candido, and it features texts taken from his weekly column, “Notas de crítica literária” (Book review notes), published in the Folha da Manhã daily. Here, the weapon serves different purposes. The fight for enlightenment, the battle for critical spirit and the building of citizenship. Once again, there is a sort of mimetic effect between the object and the book, but also a dislocation of meanings which, by the way, is typical of the activity of reading.
{[( )]} is an absolutely unique book. It is also a sculptural object with many possible forms and constructions. The artist tells that while working on this book, he would constantly think of the verb “livrar”** conjugated in first person singular: I free myself from. {[( )]} is, therefore, about what we free ourselves from, what was once lost, what has been forgotten.
Honório thus intended to create a first book that was free: free for non-hierarchized, nonauthoritarian perusal, with no specific numbering or causal sequencing, devoid of the notion of development, non-bound. As such, it would be playful, amenable to being assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in any configuration. This is, therefore, a free book. Free from a preconceived format, from left-to-right, front-to-back, top-to-bottom reading, with no single direction or conclusion. As, by the way, reading should be, as it was by definition born free.
A vontade de saber (The will to know) consists of an arrangement comprising the first edition of Michel Foucault’s book “Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir” (1976). The cover of the book issued by the prestigious French publisher Gallimard, however, has a hole in it precisely where the preposition par (“by”) should be: “par Michel Foucault.” The stem of a natural flower, namely, an anthurium, runs through the hole. In doing so, the anthurium – preferably red – is balanced out by its own weight. It is an unlikely balance, but the stem is certainly what holds this heart-shaped flower. With its erect spadix, it goes across the entire book as the latter sits on the stand.
An ornamental flower native to tropical regions, the anthurium is often seen in vases, in interior decoration, and in gardens. Its inner portion, often red and shaped like a heart, is called the bract, and its job is to attract pollinators to the plant. Due to its shape and color, the flower has taken on various meanings. In Umbanda religion, for instance, this plant pleases the Exus and is employed as an offering or during spiritual cleansing. The anthurium is thus at once pleasing to the eye and spiritual, and its shape and color exude sensuality.
In The will to know, in turn, the French philosopher presents a long history of sexuality in the West, showing how restrictions paradoxically implied its encouragement. Once again, art duplicates reality, extrapolating it. It does not reproduce it, but it produces and creates meanings by associating the book’s subject matter to the shape of the flower. A vontade de saber is, at once, concept and form.
In 2017, Honório was invited by the women’s collective Dulcinéia Catadora (Dulcinéia, the Picker) to work on a “book-artwork.” The collective was established in 2007 by Lúcia Rosa, following a collaboration with Eloísa Cartonera for the 27th São Paulo Biennial. That wasn’t the first time the Dulcinéia collective had created a book alongside an artist; there had been collaborations with Fabio Morais, Élida Tessler, Keila Alaver, and Paulo Bruscky.
Thus, the piece evolved out of conversations between Thiago Honório and four women from the collective. DULCINÉIA was entirely created using packaging cardboard and written out using a paper picker. The punched-out holes spell the name “Dulcinéia.” The book features the letters in that same name, each on one page, written through different gestures, pressures, expressions, and states of mind, by the eight hands and four heads of the women who comprise the Dulcinéia Catadora collective. By the way, each of the books contains at least one letter or marking from each of these four women: Agatha Emboava, Andreia Emboava, Lúcia Rosa, and Maria Aparecida Dias da Costa.
Leituras brings a performative dimension associated with the act of reading. One can read silently or aloud, alone or in public, but also to the public.
In the case of this work, a person reads, aloud and in public, Mário de Andrade’s 1928 text “O Aleijadinho e a sua posição nacional” (Aleijadinho and his national standing). One page was read each day at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, in Congonhas, Minas Gerais, and footage was taken of the readings, while the book in the exhibit was kept open on the matching page. The video resulting from this action marked by cuts will be shown for the first time ever during this show at the Mário de Andrade Library.
The reading work done in Leituras is, therefore, partial, and takes place within the realm of its own partiality. It takes 58 days of exhibition, corresponding to the 58 pages of text in the first edition of the book, for it to be completed. As such, the work alludes to the fracture of a reading syncopated by time.
The reading of the text started out as a group activity: an orator reading to his community. As the activity became routinized, it became clearer that everyone read together somehow, and waited together for the reading to continue the next day.
Honório’s work thus takes on many heuristic dimensions, evoking the very plurality of individual and collective activities and knowledge involved in the act of reading. The person doing the reading turns the text into a performance. Moreover, the artist chooses precisely this essay by Mário de Andrade, who sought national identity at a time when such utopian unity was still believed in.
In Miolo (Insides), the artist punches a hole through the pages and the cover of a facsimile of the book “Pau Brasil” (1925), by Oswald de Andrade. This time around, the stripe on the Brazilian flag where the motto “Order and Progress” would otherwise be is removed from the cover. Deconstructed and shuffled up, this inner bit is now laid out in an oval white porcelain plate. All is set for the deglutition of letters to begin.
Ouro Preto is composed of the first edition of Manuel Bandeira’s book “Guia de Ouro Preto” (Ouro Preto Travel Guide, 1938) with a magnifying glass over the illustration by Luís Jardim. The lens magnifies what is minute and highlights the relevance of a precious scene that must be seen up close. This is about not only maximizing the valuable ore extracted from mines in Ouro Preto, but also the content of the reading. On the other hand, the piece invites us to reexamine, this time from a critical perspective, the violent colonial slave-based past. The magnifying glass, a tool of the historian who looks at details, is thus employed in scrutinizing the document, in analyzing a past which is not and cannot be sacralized.
Paulicéia is an artwork comprised of a concrete sculpture into which a facsimile edition of the Mário de Andrade book “Paulicea desvairada” (1922) is inlaid. The piece includes the sculptural object, the performance enacted on Consolação Street in downtown São Paulo, and a video thereof.
The artwork features a recurrent operation throughout Honório’s output: the transplanting of surfaces through procedures such as dislocations, cuts, and montages.
The work centers around the first-ever Brazilian modernist poetry book, “Paulicea desvairada” (Frantic São Paulo), written by Mário de Andrade in 1920 and 1921, and published in 1922. The book is based on the poet’s strolls through the streets of “Paulicea,” a São Paulo that developed in its folly, touting the notion of progress as it pushed the boundaries of its own decadence.
“Paulicea desvariada” thus emerged amid the context of a fast-changing metropolis: swift, unchecked expansion combined with major population growth. An urbanization project that carried within it its own destruction and erasure through stone and concrete.
In Honório’s sensitive rereading, the rhombus on the cover of “Paulicea desvairada” is now cut out and extracted from the surface. It is worth noting that the geometric shape of the rhombus is reminiscent of the patterns used in harlequin costumes, which in turn mimic the image of the court jester or buffoon.
Besides entertaining the crowd, these characters also mocked people and their social status. The rhombus equally references the sidewalk patterns of major urban centers. In the case of Honório concrete piece, the sculpture turns to city space, an urban record of the book, an elusive space within the logic of urbanity. A minor detail to be remembered and then forgotten.
The piece Memorando (Memorandum), proposed for the first edition of the project MAPA – No calor da hora (MAPA – In the heat of the hour), took a poetic and political approach to discussing the notions of access and interdiction attempts – in the form of censorship – on reading.
Honório’s piece reflects the outcome of an invitation to explore the realm of advertising, of the large wheatpaste ads that have become part of the landscape in an expressway in the city of Porto Velho, Rondônia.
At the time of commissioning, Honório did not know much about the city. At that point, Thiago Honório recalled Mário de Andrade’s “anti-traveler” experience. In other words, his only record of the place was taken from the pages of “O turista aprendiz” (The apprentice tourist) and the photographs taken by the author using his Kodak.
The artist also got wind, in 2020, of “Memorando-Circular n.º 4/2020/SEDUC-DGE.” This document, sent out to Regional Education Offices on February 6, 2020 by the Rondônia Secretariat of Education, ordered the removal from schools of books such as “Macunaíma,” by Mário de Andrade, and another 42 classic works, among them “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas” (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), by Machado de Assis, and “Os sertões” (Rebellion in the Backlands), by Euclides da Cunha.
Those were the times of a fascist, authoritarian government which encouraged the removal and banning of key books from Brazilian literature due to allegations of subversion and bad morals. And it was thus, as a dissident attitude, that the idea came up for Memorando – an artwork in the form of a billboard and wheatpaste posters. It features a large-scale portrayal of the censored book’s cover.
And so running counter to censorship, instead of an erasure, Honório performs an overexposure that doubles up as an encouragement to reading. As such, during the exhibit, it will remain on show in the form of a billboard outside Mário de Andrade Library.
Tarsivaldo I, II, III (2017-2022) refers to three standalone pieces, each comprising three facsimiles of Oswald de Andrade’s 1925 book “Pau Brasil”, building upon the operation contained in the source artwork Tarsivaldo, from 2017. “Tarsivaldo” was the nickname bestowed by Mário de Andrade on the couple Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade in an eponymous poem dedicated to them and written on December 7, 1925.
In a way, Honório’s works presentize and update the characters in that modernist trio, juxtaposed and pasted onto one another. The artworks are a parody, as is the name-title-collage “Tarsivaldo.” Mário de Andrade’s poem contained the following sentence: “until it gets good and sticky.” And it does.
In the case of Tarsivaldo and Tarsivaldo I, II, III, in addition to the collage of the three facsimiles, at once superimposed and disarrayed, cuts were made into each of the three books. Instead of a somewhat nationalist bent, the cuts introduced by the artist bring to the fore in the artworks a meaning which connects us with the violences, voids, and losses relative to the colonial era, and with our own context as well.
On the double and the single
In Thiago Honório’s work, there is therefore a sense of projection and a reflection on the metalinguistic character of culture. Taken together, the pieces reveal themselves as doubles which cast aside the original context to create other ones. Yet here, the other is the same. Or the other’s other, to the extent that each artwork remembers the past and celebrates novel presents.
The artist, in turn, becomes like a modernist in reverse. His works do not consecrate. Rather, they reveal fissures in this project whose fallacies showed as early as the 1930s. Reality cannot withstand a look through the magnifying glass; the representation of modernity as salutary turns it into violence, the incompleteness of a book turns into spectacle.
For everything in Honório’s work is quotation and dislocation. The artist is the harlequin that seems to please, yet criticizes, who denounces as he accommodates. This is a brand of art which, being conceptual, can and should be analyzed in the beauty and purity that its forms outline in space; a floating blue ribbon contrasts with the heavy concrete of the floor; the red heart-shaped flower cuts through the book, which is also cut through by a spear; the billboard announces what censorship has banned; the bullet is a pro-education brigade.
Leituras is, thus, an homage to the dislocations that the work of art carries out. It is also an homage to the world of books with its utopias and impediments. It is, lastly, an homage to libraries themselves, whose utopia it is to encompass all the knowledge in the world.
This is why they are also the first to burn under authoritarian governments, and the first to resurge under democratic ones. Free from censorship and prone to all sorts of resignification, because that is what culture is about: not the rock that lies at the bottom of the river, but the river itself.
Thiago Honório’s work is made from the unceasing movement of the water in the river.
— Lilia Schwarcz and Thiago Honório
São Paulo: Mário de Andrade Library, 2024.
Translated by Gabriel Blum