Saturday night in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. The street market is in full swing, stalls everywhere in the grounds of a local institution (we never did discover what it was), high above the traffic of the street. On sale are handicrafts of all kinds – lace and embroidery, wooden, metal and ceramic ornaments, clothes of all kinds and for all ages, sweet and savoury food, and above the terraced gardens where the stalls are pitched, a rudimentary bar in a large room. And visual artists.
Paintings are regularly on sale in street markets in Brasil, testifying to the strong visual sense of the Brasilian culture. In Praca Republica in Sao Paulo on Sundays, here in Santa Teresa in Rio, in Praca Benedicto Calixto on Saturdays in Sao Paulo, fine artists, amateurs and decorators jostle to attract the eye. We stop at a pitch on the corner of a terrace, occupied by Edson Louzada.
Edson Louzada’s calling card
A genial presence with curly white hair, he appreciates our attention and talks freely about his work. Pop artists – Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Peter Blake – are clearly his artistic forebears. He’s a Paulistano retired from advertising to paint, and to enjoy the Rio lifestyle. Many of his works are homages to the Warhol full-face portrait, executed in the large-scale comic-book style which Lichtenstein popularised. Warhol’s portraits had a tongue-in-cheek element – photo-booth portraits, and large daubs of bright silk-screened colour, to accentuate the ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ style of his clients. In Brasil the celebrity portrait has reverted to iconic status, and Louzada’s work fits the bill. He needs to sell.
Something else attracts my eye. He has used another kind of icon. The statue of Cristo Redentor, “the world’s largest Art Deco statue”, is floating in a field of mixed-media images. Postcards, newspapers, tourist snaps and scraps of musical score draw your attention to and fro, skimming over a comic-book Cristo which both embraces and shrugs at Rio life – the hillside favelas and the richly-stuccoed ceilings of the ancien regime, the coastline lights twinkling against the silhouette of the Sugarloaf, the smooth young limbs of carnaval dancers and the handguns of youth crime (POW! really does mean POW!), yellow Santa Teresa trams and black-and-white pavements, futebol and choro music.
“Corcovado”, tecnica mista, Edson Louzada, 2012
Fraud, dengue fever, politics, violence and pacification are yesterday’s news aging on fading newsprint. You may take Cristo’s gesture for a fatalistic ‘whatever’ raising of hands except that, in best comic-book tradition, top right a bright yellow aeroplane flys a banner the colours of the Brasil flag proclaiming “Basta de Corrupção!!! “Enough corruption!” Again, an artistic style which has come and gone in the West is reinvigorated in Brasil. Pop art, murals and graffiti, jazz, soap opera – they breathe new life in the Southern hemisphere.
When you ask someone here “How are you?” they reply not with a British “Not too bad” but with a Brasilian “Tudo otimo!” “Everything’s grand!” Given the optimistic energy of Brasil, perhaps they will be able to address the problem of political ethics with new vigour.
P.S. Edson Louzada can be reached at louzadapop@gmail.com. Every Saturday and Sunday evening between 6 and midnight he is at the Avenida Atlântica market on the central reservation – the calçadão – on the beachfront in Copacabana in Rio. He’s at posto de salvamento 5, opposite Rua Sá Ferreira.
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