Poliester
vol 2 num. 5 spring 1993
MARIO CRAVO NETO
Edward Leffingwell
Mario Cravo Neto lives and works in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where he was
born in 1947.
Mario Cravo Neto’s photographs are radiant with observed grace. Meditative
impressions of private actions, they involve the photographer in acts of consecration.
Remarkable for their level of archievement, Cravo Neto’s photographs
are linked to all of his production as an artist by their formality, a reductive
content distinguished by a heightened engagement with light and shadow, and
an intensity of focus that eliminates the non-essential entirely and concentrates
on qualities essencial to the subject. This luminous physicality is an attribute
of the transaction between the willing presence of the subject and Cravo Neto,
he-who-took-the-picture.
The quality of these uncannily perfect prints is the result of, he says, just
a certain kind of paper, and the tendency to print dark, no secrets, achieved
in pursuit of a sublime quietude. And they seem, somehow, inevitable. It is
no coincidence that in the photographs of created objects in two of Cravo
Neto’s books – color studies of ex votos found in northeastern Brazil
and of the sculpture of Mario Cravo Neto Junior, Cravo Neto’s father
– the sculpted objects themselves seem to contain the characteristics
of his human subjects: authority of presence, distinct identity, frontality
of presentation , full engagement with the ambient moment of the shoot.
Mario Cravo Neto came to photography by way of sculpture. In the 1970’s,
before the process-oriented influence of arte povera was widely known there,
the artist worked with the red clay soil of Brazil, with live plants within
tubes, fire and light, space and ritual1 , exhibiting in the important international
biennials of São Paulo three times during the decade, and in 1978,
in the exhibition Subterranean Art at the Museo Carrillo Gil and Galeria Juan
Martín, Mexico City. At the time , Cravo Neto incorporated into his
vocabulary of installation the battered, stained tarpaulins that originally
served as protective covers for truck cargo. The tarps tended to form a modulated
ground for the frontally placed objects that figured them: burned camera parts,
a found bird’s nest of fiberglass filaments in a transparent reliquary,
a tire. He continuous to use these tarps as backdrops in his photographs,
and it appears as though the subjects of his photographs are projectes upon
that screen.
So it seems appropriate that in the recent Los Angeles exhibition Body of
Earth, Cravo Neto reduced the photograph as object to the ephemeral extended
moments of simultaneous sequential projection . In the installation Scars
of Our Inheritance, two large-format slide projectors threw black and white
images in vast scale on a bracket of walls – studies of his friends,
family, his spiritual guide, most often in relation to objects, lingering
long enough to engrave and enduring retinal memory, a definitive recognition.
On a long connecting wall, Cravo Neto inserted a single, similarly scaled,
but static image: in color, the lacerated wooden meat of a colonial Christ’s
flagellated back. Brutal red gouged into the polychrome wood vivified the
darkened gallery, while the populated images of the side walls advanced together
as though in conversation, or a dance. An unseen recording further animated
the sequecing of images, murmured voices, somewhere between labored exhalations
and chanted cries, an enduring, eurythmic, mantra: local street sounds mixed
with voices, slowed to an inflected hum. A fourth machine projected a single
small image of a text on the remaining wall near the entrance, the words offering
this reading:
The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that
Thus skeletally supported, they can bear the burden of their flesh.
Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved
From the infantile desire to be and have everything.
Phillip Rieff 2
Many,
perhaps most of Cravo Neto’s subjects are portrayed in relation to another
object: what appears to be the brass head of a baton, a rock or bird or dog,
a bone, shell, pipe, another figure, a veil. These things have intensely formal
visual qualities that include, among other characteristics, reflectivity,
texture, modulated pattern, resonance. But these ambiguous objects may also
be seen as attributes by which the subjects ‘s identity or power may
be understood , or recognized as ritual offering to the Orixas, the deities
of Candomblé. They are certainly emblematic of Cravo
Neto’s understanding of ritual and legacy of Yoruba culture in contemporary
Brazil. 3
In the photograph Odé (1989), a child wears the head of a apparently
living swan like a blindfold or mask, its eye, the child’s. The white
bird’s beak is grasped in the hand of a figure in the background, drawing
the bird into place, an objectand the gesture that introduces the object.
Pandang (1991) and Tinho with Bone (1990), are partially masked in a similar
way by objects that read as instruments of ritual celebration, poised in moments
of regard, as Cravo Neto and his subjects alter the conventions of the gaze.
In a more recent image, Lua with Egg, to Brancusi (1993), the entranced figure’s
arched throat tilts back as if to receive some sacrament as the mouth disgorges
and egg, a luminous expression of creation and abundance. The gesture in all
these images is in itself a language, the objects involved serving as elements
of a vocabulary that inflects that language. The late Brazilian curator and
critic Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça has observed that Mario Cravo Neto
has expressed, in his work, a profound respect for his participating subjects,
precluding them from being perceived as seductive.4 Cravo Neto endows these
images with his understanding of the passionate reconciliation effected by
the cultural, ethnic and racial confluence of northeastern Brazil, the mixture
of the heritage of an indigenous population with the cultural legacy of Portugal
and Africa introduced during the colonial period. The faces and bodies of
these people contemplate, for the photographer who has interpreted them, the
healing wounds of their mutual inheritance.
Edward Leffingwell is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles.
1. Anderson, Susan M. "Scars of Our Inheritance". in Body to Earth,
Three Artists from Brazil. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery,
University of South California, 1993.
2. Rieff, Phillip. "The Impossible Culture – Oscar Wilde and the
Charisma of the Artist." Encouter 35, no 3 (London, September 1970).
3. Anderson, Susan. Op. cit.
4. de Mendonça, Casimiro Xavier. Mario Cravo Neto. Atlante 1 (São
Paulo, 1989)