Outside São Paulo’s electronics shops and clothing stores, the ubiquitous announcers hired to drum up business proclaim the special offers available “today only, Black Friday.” The US festival of retail capitalism has been enthusiastically adopted by Brazil, and queues of eager bargain-hunters snaked along the pavements.
Art galleries would not usually partake in these antics. Unless, that is, they let Marcelo Cipis loose. That evening at Gomide&Co, the veteran Brazilian pop artist had dressed its staff in insta-print sky blue T-shirts and red baseball caps (in contrast to the de rigueur tasteful linen of Brazilian gallery workers). The white cube had been lined with 440 paintings, each 40 × 30 cm, in twenty-four designs, hung in a grid, made on a production line by Cipis in eighty days. Had been, because, by the time I arrived at the private view, five minutes after its advertised opening time, ninety-one of them had been sold for the cut-price deal of R$3,999.99 (about 750 USD) each. “See it, love it, take it: Pay & Go (nice and easy!)” the press release proclaimed. The sold paintings had been taken off the wall, revealing large red vinyl spots beneath, enlarged versions of the type that denote a sale on an art fair booth. The Cipris-branded tote bags in which the paintings were delivered to their new owners were a collaboration with a fashion brand, which in turn sent models wearing its garb to the opening, adding to the surreal kitsch of the evening.
I saw a pair of collectors pick out a work that took their fancy: a flat, stylistic, acrylic rendering of a painter’s palette floating on a turquoise background. One of twenty-nine paintings of the same design. As a staffer was dispatched up a stepladder, a cheer went up among the crowd. The other designs, equally emoji-like in their simplicity, included a laughing devil, a smoking mouth, a match, a compass rose, a teapot, a dice, and a matinee idol. All of the shouting-women works had already sold, as denoted by a line of red dots. Each motif was replicated uniformly or with variations in color in a nod to capitalism’s illusion of consumer choice: a book with differently hued covers; a black skull formed from the letters C-I-P-I-S. The effect of the artist’s bright palette and geometrical arrangements is like the visual cacophony of a supermarket breakfast cereal aisle, to the point I’m half expecting to see Tony the Tiger leering out (“É demais!”).
Cipis has form for humorous exposés of art market mores. He is a beloved figure within Brazil, though relatively little known beyond (high import tariffs mean Brazilian artists can make a good career without being dependent on the international art market). At the 1991 Bienal de São Paulo he established a fictional multinational company called Cipis Transworld, Art, Industry & Commerce, exhibiting the corporation’s double doors and door mat, reception desk, wares including soap, Pyrex, and shoe wax, and vitrines detailing the brand’s fictional heritage. His painting style, with its easily recognizable symbols, has the quality of advertising, and the motifs present on the walls of Gomide&Co suggest shorthand associations (our collector couple might hang a painting of a palette to showcase their sophisticated love of art).
While the paintings reduce the world to symbols, the mode of their sale strips away the artifice the art world constructs to justify its prices. Gone is the performance of intellectual austerity, exclusivity, and luxury, leaving the canvases as tokens of labor. There is an element of institutional critique to all this, but while he is no Damien Hirst–style celebrant of excess, Cipis makes his points about capitalism and art market hypocrisy with a similar humor and directness. Just as the signs of Cipis’s paintings appear unambiguous, so the performance—the red spots, the ladders, the models, and champagne—might best be taken at face value. In an art world where artists are often the last people to make money, Cipis coined it on Black Friday.
