Jornal do Brasil - Elvira Vigna
12/11/2003

EXPERIMENT AND PERIL

There is no art in original images documented by photographs. They are mouths, hearts, flowers, sunbeams. Unsurprisingly conventional, joyful, characteristically consumer-goods advertising. The images that surround us wherever we are, almost pornographic in their lack of dialogue, in their immediate, shallow utilitarianism. Want a heart? Here’s one. A mouth? Here you go. All the same. In series. Made to calm you. But there is nothing calming about what the France-Brazil Museum offers us in Christina Oiticica’s exhibit The Four Seasons. Quite the opposite. The original images were buried by the artist about a year ago. Now they have been dug up. Christina Oiticica has invented a sort of futures market for her products. Here too is total delivery. Not to the laws of the market but rather to the laws of time. The latter are more predictable than the former: the canvases were spoiled. You come in through the heavy gate of what used to be our Customs building (the France-Brazil Museum) and you find yourself surrounded by post-capitalism in rags. Highly appropriate. All that is left of the merchandise of the nearby port are the stones put there by Grandjean de Montigny in 1819. All that remains of the symbols of consumerism painted by Christina Oiticica are vestiges redesigned by roots, cracks. This is not the first time she has painted one thing and exhibited another. Her earlier images, feminine types (black and Indian) in pearls and old dresses, little angels or media people like Madre Tereza and Joan of Arc, sold a supposed, idealized ''feminine universe''. But just like now, they spoke of time in this very personal key: time versus consumerism, technology, whatever is designed to be fast and facile. One of the two has to give in. And it is not time. Graduated in industrial design from Rio de Janeiro’s School of Fine Arts and in architecture from Bennett University, Christina carries within her the concept that art is applied and sold. She has just made tee-shirts for a fashion store. She has made magnets for refrigerators and boxes for decks of cards. She had hardly any contact with her cousin Hélio Oiticica, famous for his refusal to deal with the market. One might think that she is unaware of the anti-capitalist result of her show. Not at all. Asked whether she grows anxious about the result of the interment – in forests, rivers and city storm drains - she answers that whatever the result may be , it is always good because that is how she wants it, whatever way it turns out. Her vocabulary is quite different, all about myths and rites: earth, nature, beginning. But by accepting the partnership of whatever passes by - insects or rain – to make her non-authoral mass images, Christina Oiticica ends up pointing to precisely the contingency between herself and her images. Which spells transcendence.

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