Aprendendo com Miguel Bakun

de Luise Malmaceda, Paulo Miyada, Alberto da Veiga Guignard

At the outset of the exhibition-cum-essay curated by Luise Malmaceda and Paulo Miyada to be held at Instituto Tomie Ohtake is the oeuvre of Miguel Bakun (Marechal Mallet, PR 1909 - Curitiba, PR, 1963), a self-taught painter considered one of the leading modern artists from the state of Paraná. As the curators have noted, the event is meant to reflect on representation of landscapes in Brazil's subtropical region that have "so often been sidelined by the eminently warm-climate, coastal beach imaginary of a country whose picture-postcard sites are mostly found north of the Tropic of Capricorn. According to Malmaceda and Miyada the exhibition offers "an immersion in the aesthetics of coldness." This notion taken from the eponymous book by Rio Grande do Sul musician Vitor Ramil was mediated by Bakun's paintings and their shared appreciation of everyday landscapes of 1940's Curitiba, a city on the verge of modernizing but still bearing many signs of its rural surroundings. The exhibition comprises three large groups engaged in dialogue with the artist: one specifically covering landscapes from southern Brazil, in particular the state of Paraná, consisting of pieces by Alfredo Andersen (1869 1935), Bruno Lechowski (1887 1941), Caio Reisewitz (1967 ) and Marcelo Moscheta (1976 ); another situating Bakun within Brazilian modernism together with Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896 1962), Alfredo Volpi (1896 1988), Iberê Camargo (1914 1994) and José Pancetti (1902 1998); and a third group made up of contemporary artists who, like Bakun, found in landscape an inexhaustible source of investigation, as for example Marina Camargo (1980 ), Lucas Arruda (1983 ) and Fernando Lindote (1960 ).