Oficina Molina-Palatnik

Since December 2020, Sesc Avenida Paulista—a recently reformulated unit of Sesc São Paulo—is holding the show Oficina Molina-Palatnik [Molina-Palatnik Workshop], featuring works by two deceased Brazilian artists, Abraham Palatnik and Mestre Molina, which reveals points of dialog and clashing between their artistic legacies. Despite their very different backgrounds, their respective oeuvres each evince the rich constructive tradition of Brazilian art. And they were both dedicated, each in his own way, to inventive pleasure and playful appreciation of the artwork, with a poetic focus on movement and light.

Attentive to the tradition of the object and of sculpture in Brazilian art, the curatorial approach re-echoes an important facet of the local production: the object constructed in a space-time relationship involving motion. From a constructive heritage, there is thus a poetics of movement, spanning from the engineering of the artwork’s conception to the interactive gesture with the spectator. Through their wide-ranging creations, each of these two artists left a legacy of art linked to technology, with a poetic fascination for clever mechanisms, juxtaposing popular knowledge and formal learning, the erudite and the popular, planning and intuition, design and jury-rigging, manuality and automation, among other opposing pairs.

Abraham Palatnik (1928–2020)—who died this past May from COVID-19—was a pioneer of Brazilian modern art. Trained in engineering, in his artistic career he problematized the relationship between art and technology, which both enter symbiotically in his production. He became outstanding in the Latin American vanguard art scene in light of his participation in the 1st Bienal de São Paulo (1951). While official art history considers Alexander Calder as one of the originators of kinetic art, Palatnik brought it into the context of the local debate, inserting automation, movement and the interplay of light and shadow. Works by him featured in the show include pieces from his iconic Objetos Cinéticos [Kinetic Objects] series: Objeto Cinético KK-7 (1966/2007), which is part of the Sesc Art Collection, Objeto Cinético CK-8 (1966/2005) and Objeto Cinético P-28 (1971/2000).

For his part, Mestre Molina (1917–1998), was a persevering inventor and artist. He traveled throughout Brazil nomadically for two decades, experiencing a wide range of contexts which would later influence his production. At the age of 52, he began to dedicate himself to assembling fascinating contraptions through a process of tinkering—objects that give rise to playful movements—and garnered recognition with his first exhibition at Sesc Santos, in 1974. He was an outstanding creator in the Brazilian popular tradition of dolls and animated objects, all produced with materials that he had at hand: wood, cans, rubber and rope, coupled with industrial resources such as silicone, plaster and special fabrics. Visitors to the show can see a selection of seven of the twenty-five artworks by him which are part of Sesc’s permanent collection, including A Vida de Cristo [The Life of Christ] (undated), Bar Novo [New Bar] (undated), Marcenaria Natal [Natal Carpentry] (1969–1974), and Palácio dos Fantasmas [Palace of Ghosts] (1969–1974).

This exhibition was structured by the institution itself. The selection establishes a poetic, historical, and educational dialogue between Palatnik’s productions (with a formal repertoire and insertion in the art circuit) and those of Molina (active in the popular art scene and unrecognized in the art system until recently). Beyond the central theme of these two artists, the exhibition delves into the institution’s memory and heritage, thus furthering the Sesc Art Collection’s role in the construction of historical and educational memory in regard to the diversity of modern and contemporary art from all over Brazil, without archaic distinctions between refined and popular art, or high and low culture.

At this moment, in-person visits to exhibitions held in units of Sesc São Paulo are only possible through previous scheduling online and follow the protocols established by the local authorities for the combat of COVID-19.