Almandrade

artist, poet and architect resident in Salvador, Bahia, was a member of the group of artists creator of the Poema/Processo movement and one of the founders of the Grupo de Estudos de Linguagem da Bahia, who edited the Semiótica magazine in 1974. Since the 1970 she produces work geared towards conceptualism and minimalist aesthetics, having a great part of it transiting through national postal services – as in the case of the sealed envelope which he sent to his friends in the year 1973, where the word inside could only be revealed when it was held against the light (a classic method used by spies), where one could read “psiu” (or “shush”), a reference to the political system’s control over discourse at the time of the Brazilian dictatorship.

Antonio Luiz M. Andrade, better known under the pseudonym Almandrade, is one of the main representatives of the Brazilian visual poetry, which prevailed in the 1970s. Sculptures, paintings, poems and other visual objects illustrate his 40 year artistic career.

The drawings, paintings, visual poems, artist books and objects by Almandrade, acronym for Antonio Luís Morais Andrade (born in São Felipe, Brazil, 1953 and lives in Salvador), contain, at the same time, inventiveness and enigma. The blank paper is always a protagonist. On it, shapes and lines, letters and words, are in constant feedback. That which, at first sight, may seem an abstract form reveals being a poem—and vice versa. In this semantic ballet, Almandrade has been paving the way over the last four decades towards becoming one of the most creative authors of visual poems in Brazil. His work absorbs and synthesizes influences from several sources—from process-poem to comic strips, from visual communication to calligrams, from concrete to popcrete. His interests include everything from the human body to politics, including speech acts, architecture (which is the field he studied), and geometric abstraction.

Rodrigo Moura

The 3rd Bahia Biennial in 2014 was to me a privileged occasion when I discovered Almandrade’s work. Various aspects of his work were presented. The first proposal was an incredible three-dimensional exercise, going from a big sculpture located at UFBA’s Ondina Campus to amazing mockups in small scale at São Bento Convent: colorful compositions that dialogue with the landscape and the buildings or the convent’s volumes, evoking, in an interesting paradox, the rigor of Franz Weissmann or Amilcar de Castro’s shapes, but also a labyrinth by Hélio Oiticica (as we can see in Inhotim). We could also think about Mondrian, with his refined composition-landscapes, made of horizontal and vertical lines. The different planes that interpenetrate offer visitors a balanced game of colorful geometrical shapes aired, in some situations, by windows of shade and light of constructive and minimalist tradition. As Francisco Antônio Zorzo notes, Almandrade “intentionally keeps a distance from baroque, expressionism and other sensual like trends that are recurrent in Bahia and Brazil’s art”. Actually, by discovering this tentacular work, the Biennial presented also numerous drawings and poems, thus the artistic references fade a little and make us travel away from Bahia.

Sculpture, assemblage made with simple everyday objects, drawings, engravings; all his works are part of a subtle base of humor, from where rises all pleasure. He makes us belong to an intelligent world where it’s possible to get along with reality. His strict graphic vocabulary, with an economy of means, the shape games, sometimes of chromatic oppositions, propose minimum, subtle, forgery free works. Almandrade plays with the full and the empty and also with his texts that place the natural space in discussion, compelling us to search for the understanding of his enigmas. From his mind Ready Made, of signs and simple words, he forces us to mentally remake the work’s construction process, which might lead to the frustration imposed by doubt. His silent and synthetic works under essential shapes are visual aphorisms that lead to new perceptions and conceptions.

Marc Poitier