ALÉCIO DE ANDRADE: ITINERARY OF CHILDHOOD
Alécio de Andrade is young and restless — the restlessness of these difficult times, disorienting, contradictory and disturbing, full of agonies and defeats. Seeking a field of salvation for explanation, motivation, and affirmation, he has passed through music, poetry, and fiction, intoxicated himself on the solitude that the multitudes carry in their broad and clamorous midst, and wound up musically and poetically at photography, where life has manifested itself at last in the fullness to which he aspired. His eyes, still reflecting a child’s purity and enchantment, afflicted by a mild myopia that the exactitude of the lens corrects and orders, have found their path in the childhood of beaches, parks, schools, and sidewalks, a path emotional and passionate and captivating, anxiety-neutralizing, from which he has given us, with sweet impressionability and the vigor of his avidity for beauty and truth, ecstatic and enchanted moments unnoticed by ordinary eyes, moments both ephemeral and eternal.
Photography is a technique and, as a technique, the more refined it is, the more perspectives it offers; nor will it do for an artist to forgo the cuisine of his chosen art, the intimate knowledge of its spices, its seasonings, the tips and tricks he has cleverly amassed through practice, curiosity, and patient research. But by technique alone, perfected as it may be, art does not elevate itself, does not flourish, does not console, does not unburden, does not impart or endure. It is a fundamental necessity that it be cemented with sensitivity. And sensitivity — fine, strange, incisive, captivating — Alécio de Andrade does not lack.
Now he is off to Europe to study: that is, to see, to see a great deal — the world is vast, the horizons infinite, infinite too the territories of dreams! But before he leaves, as if he means to show how much he can learn from his wanderings, encounters, and humble apprenticeship, he offers us this magical little exhibition — snapshots of children, a garden of dreams, laughter and unposed attitudes, in which his soul delights in the joys of creation, capturing time that will not be lost and that, wonderfully, in black and white, he helps us reclaim.
MARQUES REBELO
An angel of the night follows Alécio de Andrade, poet of photography. Photography, particularly in black and white, is a nocturnal art, even an oneiric one. Like dreams, it animates what was; through it, light is born from shadow. From the shadow that, sometimes, was within us. Which also means that, at least in the hands of this poet, the camera shows us what we have been carrying unbeknownst to ourselves, what we did not know we had seen but suddenly, forcefully, arrests our attention. In a fragment of a second, the lens has captured that which may be eternal in a creature, and which undoubtedly makes it what it is; it has captured that which was secret, hidden, and reveals it.
It is this revelatory power that the present exhibition highlights. Alécio de Andrade displays a series of images dedicated to the irreplaceable itinerary of childhood, not by trying, as a less intuitive artist would somewhat naively do, to give the impression of movement, to make us believe in the motion of a motionless reproduction, but rather by fixing, practically engraving in our sensibility, those syntheses of movement that gestures can be.
As if on the silk of the page, where brightness and shadow, whites and charcoal blacks, encircle children’s faces, arms, hands, legs, waves at sea, branches, toys, windows, and flowers, our rhapsodist of silence conveys sadnesses, astonishments, dialogues, dreams. What he records through the camera’s cyclopean gaze are children’s reactions to beings and things, and also to certain discoveries, such as a first journey, solitary and forbidden, to the end of the street.
Such explorations, which include curiosities, apprehensions, the beginnings of adventures, are related to us by an Ariel who is invisible, appropriately. The boys and girls are unaware, as they should be, of the presence of he who sees them and allows us to see them forever; he who has patiently awaited the moment of fullness at which, seen in a certain way, they become what they truly are: little devils, passionate and deaf (deaf to all that fails to capture their momentary attention). Someone has glimpsed in them the vital attitude that encompasses all others and liberates a creature from gregarious confusion.
Ariel has composed a vast poem, calligraphically, as in the times of artisans and incunabula, inspired by sources who don’t know they are sources, children (in this respect they resemble saints, likely unknowing saints). The “Lord’s bounty” calls for witnesses, and today we have ours: a young poet of unforgettable images, who reminds us in his own way that children are unexpected and inexhaustible sources of life.
ROBERTO ALVIM CORRÊA
Alécio de Andrade – Itinerário da infância, Petite Galerie, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1964
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker
THE PORTRAITIST OF CHILDREN
At PETITE GALERIE, the young man with the boyish face has opened a photography exhibition. I advise my readers, should there be any, to go take a peek. The young man’s name is Alécio de Andrade and he’s not related to me; Andrades are as numerous on this earth as drops of water in the ocean, except they lack the unique and tight-knit family resemblance of drops of water. So I’m not promoting an uncle or a nephew. It just happens to really be worth seeing Alécio’s photos. If you don’t come away with a special feeling of tenderness for life, well then, dear friend, stop considering yourself a person; odds are good that you’re nothing but a speaking object, and even then…
The exhibition is called “Itinerário da infância” (itinerary of childhood) and takes us on a tour of children’s faces and gestures: the ones we see daily in schoolyards and parks, but that Alécio has seen again, with slower and more sympathetic eyes (his boyish face notwithstanding). Not with that cloying sweetness with which we generally look at kids when they’re ours or our friends’, provided they don’t muddy our pants. A sweetness that serves only to disguise the vanity of authorship or express our self-flattery, which is ultimately the same thing. That’s not the proper way to see children. If we are to begin to penetrate the secret of children through their appearance and capture that elusive image, it must be with a mix of affectionate patience and cunning sympathy. Alécio’s experiment went even further: he hit upon the moment when children reveal themselves fearlessly, naturally, merely curious as to what the photographer is up to. What is precious in these images, in which poetry is not an added external element but the very essence of the thing, is the encounter with a many-layered mystery that renders it simple, accessible. Hence the happiness they bring us. What a discovery, what a reunion with our selves!
I have tried to express my enthusiasm to Alécio in a few words, which I reproduce here:
Look, discover this secret: one thing is two — itself and its image.
Look closer. One thing is innumerable things. Its image contains an infinity of images in a dream state, germinating in space and light.
The same is true of creatures, multiples of themselves.
The variety of images reveals the world that is born in each instant you contemplate it: shapes, rhythms, angles, expressions, impressions, fragments, syntheses.
An image is a living being like any other. And it wants to permeate your spirit, to inhabit it like an affectionate guest.
If you welcome it with all the purity of sight and total sympathy of thought, it will make you rich.
These images go beyond intersidereal means of communication. They insinuate themselves into the depths of life. They speak of that matter you carry with you like a trunk of nostalgia. The trunk opens and your childhood greets you with the innocence of a spring.
There can be no better use of photography than nourishing us with this lost piece of our soul.
An art bound to the most elusive and perennial of poetic realities, such is the sublime gift of Alécio de Andrade.
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
“Imagens diferentes: Alécio & criança”, Correio da Manhã,
30 September 1964, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Obra Completa, Aguilar Editora, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1967, pp. 1007-1008.
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.
WHAT ALÉCIO SEES
The voice said to him (a secret voice):
— Go, Alécio, and see.
See and show what you see, that everyone may capture
through your eyes the feeling of forms
which is the first — and last — feeling of life.
And Alécio goes and sees
the nature of things and of people,
the day, in its unknown newness,
unveiling itself each morning,
the dog, the park, the trace of the passage
of people in the street, the idyll
never extinguished beneath ideologies,
the umbilical grace of the female nude,
conversations over coffee, images
in which life flows like the Seine or the São Francisco
to deposit itself on the surface of a leaf
on the stone of the pier
or to smile in classical canvases in museums
that know they are being contemplated
by the visitors’ timid (or arrogant) disinformation,
or perhaps
to disperse and converge
in the eternal game of children.
Ah, the children… For them,
there is a belvedere illuminated in Alécio’s eye
and his lens.
(But is Alécio’s lyrical gaze not the better lens?)
It all comes down to a fountain
and the three naked little girls who complete it,
superb, radiant, a pure photo-sculpture by Alécio de Andrade,
a matinal hymn to creation
and to the world’s continuation in hope.
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
“As fotos de Alécio”, Jornal do Brasil, 21 April 1979, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.
A BRAZILIAN LOOKS AT PARIS
All of a sudden the columnist has disappeared from Rio. Kidnapped? Fled? Hiding out due to debt or misdeeds? None of that. He’s living in Paris now, and asks that you not call him, not write to him, that you leave the old man in peace to enjoy the soul of Paris, those little-big Parisian things, in the company of a friend.
The friend is Alécio — a de Andrade too, though not a relative. A friend. No need to explain family names. We understand each other, Alécio and I. I want to see Paris without being a tourist. I’m interested in the little facets of big things. The Louvre is too universal for me. So Alécio waits until three nuns in heavy old-fashioned hoods stop to contemplate Regnault’s naked Trois Grâces, then calls me over to see. The enormous museum becomes a home: humanized.
Pont Neuf. There’s the painter, the canvas, the easel. But the painter Alécio shows me isn’t painting. Head down, hand on his chin, perhaps he’s painting inwardly (the palette is still in his open portfolio on the bench). This kind of painting requires no equipment. And how beautiful the unpainted canvas is! The Seine, in the background of the painting, glides by on a current of memories. The painter has refrained, quite sensibly, from adding any details to the ensemble.
On the Quai de Conti, the headless man walks his little dog. Headless, I say, and I say it again. He’s covered it with his jacket. At the Grand Palais, what the eye takes in with pleasure is the grand curve of the stone staircase, and the little girl climbing the steps. The rhythmic forms seem to make music — or am I listening too hard? Alécio sees the tiniest thing and extracts from it a visual thrill.
This is how we do Paris, without guide or reference, and it’s hardly surprising when we encounter Darius Milhaud here in his wheelchair, Salvador Dalí there doing one of his bits, or our own Otto Lara Resende in affable conversation with our own Cláudio Mello e Souza. Or Mário Pedrosa. Even if the map doesn’t say so, Paris is also assuredly a Brazilian city. We mustn’t feel overwhelmed by its historical splendor and beauties of classical culture. The city lets us feel the laughter of adults, the naturalness of animals, the also universal cruelty of butcheries, the millennia-old yet ever-new behavior of youth. Alécio has managed to capture Paris’s Barra do Piraí side without compromising the singular grace of a city that sums up the learning of an entire culture, the light of an entire civilization.
Now, enough lying. My season in Paris is based on 127 photos by Alécio, published as an album in Switzerland with a study in German by Julio Cortázar. The volume makes it possible to go to Paris, the Paris of the everyday, without leaving the comfort of our home: a selective exhibition of the bizarre, the lyrical, the imponderable of the fog and the waters of Paris, bundles of memory, tradition, and ordinary life. The mischievous Alécio didn’t widen his Brazilian eyes in amazement to photograph Lutetia; he kept them perfectly serene, sensitive and attentive, to collect the aspects that reflect human beings enjoying or merely living their lives in a setting full of historical reference; a city, finally, where they love and work and suffer and pay taxes and get annoyed, as in any other city.
He has neither unmasked nor glorified Paris. He has offered one version of the city, accessible to the understanding, the humor, and the fantasy of the “reader” of photos, and thus brought us all closer to that sacred monster that has stirred so many dreams around the world. Alécio’s way of seeing and interpreting Paris, without ceasing to be intellectual or intellectualized, is distinctly human. This honors and illuminates his art as a photographer.
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
“Um olhar brasileiro sobre Paris”, Jornal do Brasil, 20 June 1981, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.
