Pilgrimages in the Sahara

As any carioca knows, the Sahara is a kind of Persian market located on Rua da Alfândega, in the downtown area of Rio de Janeiro, with stalls and stands and little shops scattered throughout the adjacent streets, a colorful, loud, muffled, and aromatic tumult of people selling and buying everything. Some say it is the largest open-air mall in South America. Who knows. Whatever the case, it was there that Nelson Leirner, invariably accompanied by Liliana, his companion, would go to carry out his eternal research on objects. Some of them, plastic animals, skateboards, maps, stickers, trophies, stamps, wooden bridges, postcards, Snow White and Mickeys, were the usual protagonists of his work. Other protagonists, like saints of all kinds, the source was the Casa das Velas, in São Paulo, the great warehouse for articles connected to the supernatural. But the best was yet to come, he thought. He was sure of finding it, and he would find it, oh yes, he would find it. To do so, he would ambush himself avidly, attentively, vigilantly, through the bowels of chaotic commerce, from where he sometimes returned carrying something between the weird and the surprising, between the corny and the beautiful, in any case proof that the world is full of surprises, and that the very essence of surprises are the people who desire and consume the most extravagant objects. After all, as Roland Barthes wrote, objects are man’s signature in the world. Objects are people, and vice-versa.

No one in Brazilian art has thought deeply about the problem of the object like Nelson Leirner, its affective, symbolic, material, and social implications. Objects sweep up all possible dimensions of human existence, and Nelson, as the various groups brought together in this exhibition demonstrate, has dealt with several of them. He did this with his critical and caustic eye; he thought from the perversely and cynically sexualized children by Anne Geddes to the war; from art history, with his colleagues in turn with their still lifes, incursions into abstraction, the transgressive vocation often nullified by the desire for commerce, to sports, which he loved so much, because, as he explained, everything is a game.

Reduced to the last two decades of his production, this show does not even cover much that he did in this period. But it sheds light on the meaning of the poetics of this great artist, his tireless peregrination about things, that is, about our relations with them. He made these relationships explicit not only in his works but by wearing around his neck the indefectible necklaces made at the beginning of each year, necklaces full of amulets, ecumenical, that he wore all the time, a sign of his commitment and reverence for objects.

Agnaldo Farias