Gustavo Speridião

Rio de Janeiro, 1978

“Da ideia a chama já consome / A crosta bruta que a soterra” [The flame of the idea already burns away/ the rough burying crust]. These are the third and fourth lines of the first stanza of the Portuguese version of “The International” socialist anthem. During the second edition of Frestas, these lines ring out from a post near the Santo Antônio Bus Terminal in Sorocaba. This intervention reveals the political verve that runs through the work of Rio artist Gustavo Speridião, who employs a range of mediums, including drawing, collage, painting, installation, sculpture, photography and video. His practice questions artistic craft itself on the professional circuit, seeing the labour relations in the art world as a political fact, and looks with distrust on the privileged position bestowed upon the artwork, which he considers to be all too often endowed with high speculative value.

Speridião’s painting uses a palette inherited from Russian constructivism, but which should not be taken merely as a reference to past visualities. His canvases tend to carry a freshness of paint, which, though dry, still runs. This freshness gives his works the mural feel of a just-sprayed alleyway wall or high-rise façade. The fruit of youthful élan and revolt, the artist’s civil disobedience appears in bruising form in the series Cartazes de agitação [Posters of Agitation] and Cartazes ginasiais [High-school Posters], where his lines reveal his insubordination to the history of art and to schools as institutions, the targets of his strong, edgy, protest-poster visualities.

[U.C.]