MONTEZ MAGNO: entre Morandi, Nordeste e Tantra: Texto crítico [Critical essay]: Clarissa Diniz

Montez Magno: The Morandian Eclipse and the Coexistence of Sun and Moonlight on the Skin of a Chameleon

by Clarissa Diniz

“Everything else was eclipsed.” This is how Montez Magno (1934–2023) described his encounter with two works by Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection during a visit to the Italian city renowned for its international art biennials. The year was 1964, a time when Brazil was grappling with the tragic onset of a civil-military dictatorship while simultaneously celebrating the inauguration of its pavilion in Venice.

The artist from Pernambuco traveled to Europe on a Spanish scholarship,^[1] which also allowed him to visit other countries in the Old World. His first stop in Italy was not Venice but Bologna, where the already ailing Giorgio Morandi lived. Due to his illness, Morandi was unable to meet him. The Italian artist died just a few weeks later, on June 18, 1964, on the eve of the opening of the 32nd Venice Biennale.

The failed attempt to meet the reclusive artist in person highlights the deep impact Morandi’s work had on the young Magno. During his visit to that Biennale, he recalled, “I didn’t like anything”: “I only saw Morandi, Morandi… I was fascinated by Morandi. He captivated me with his simplicity and fantastic color. I was deeply impressed.” ^[2] That same summer, while in Milan, ^[3] Montez wrote about Giorgio:

Upon closely observing [his] painting, I realized that the still lifes from the metaphysical period are less metaphysical than those that came later, once freed from the label they had when the Bolognese painter was associated with Carrà and De Chirico.

(...) The great lesson of G. Morandi is to show that a real form can also belong to the realm of metaphysical abstraction when it is captured in its intimate essence (...). The Greek term ‘poiesis’—meaning the passage from non-being to being—with reference to art, can be applied to Morandi [when he] transitions from being to non-being, from matter to non-matter, in pictorial terms, by transcending the depicted object.

(...) Therefore, the objects Morandi uses as models—bottles, jars, cups, pitchers, knives—lose their common existence as such, their material and object identity, and attain another existential dimension. They gain a new life and a new material and formal consistency, an aura, acquiring an abstract reality through a concrete conception. In Morandi’s painting, objects undergo a sort of transubstantiation. Matter becomes spiritualized.^[4]

Montez’s encounter with Morandi’s work led him to develop insights that became crucial to his poetic, aesthetic, and political views on artistic practice. Observing Morandi’s work, which stretched the representational boundaries of the still life tradition, Magno realized that the contemplative nature of art extended beyond geometry or construction: “I believe that, in general, all abstract geometric painting has a contemplative quality.^[5] [However], even though I am a constructivist artist, I cannot spend hours looking at a Mondrian, but I can spend hours looking at Morandi... or Balthus.”^[6]

Historically part of the generation associated with the (generically labeled) counterculture—encompassing the beat, existentialist, new age, and hippie movements, among other influences—Magno, like many artists of the time, explored spiritualities and rationalities beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition, with a particular interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. His curiosity about and study of Zen and, especially, Tantra led him to practice yoga and meditation. These experiences also influenced his poetry, as well as his works and series from the 1960s to 2010, as exemplified by Nor-Zen-Deste II (1974).[7]

In a Morandi-way, however, Magno realized that contemplative intensity—"which leads the observer to a state of fusion with what one calls the divine” ^[8]—was not confined to works with spiritual themes or ambitions, such as religious icons or mandalas. Skeptical of the spiritualist craze that had spread throughout the West, especially in the United States, Magno even poked fun at himself in his attempt at a Zen-Buddhist turn.

I have long practiced yoga

and read about Zen.

I have never been enlightened

except when I see,

in the morning,

the brightness of the sun;

or when a 100-watt bulb

explodes in my face.^[9]

The Western simplification of Hinduism and Buddhism during the 1960s and 1970s had become a misleading spiritual and aesthetic trend, as John Cage (1912–1992) pointed out in the preface to his 1961 book Silence: “I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (...) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. (...) I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. (...) What, nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?”[10]

Magno, like Cage—an artist he deeply admired and to whom he dedicated the album Notassons (1993)—was profoundly influenced by the principles of Zen and especially Tantra, which inspired a long, intermittent series.^[11] However, aware of the risks of Western appropriation and distortion of these philosophies, Magno sought to distance himself from aesthetic approaches which, eager to be explicitly associated with Buddhism or Hinduism as markers of their creators' spiritual identity, often reduced these philosophies to visual schemes incapable of honoring the complexity and transformative nature of these onto-cosmological perspectives.

In response to this issue, Morandi became a paradigm for Magno. Through the Italian painter, Montez gained an understanding of the contemplative, meditative, and even spiritual nature of art, beyond religious expressions and themes: “I consider Morandi's work to embody a religious spirit. His painting is one of transcendence. The matter in those little bottles is transmuted in such a spiritualized way that it creates a sense of transcendence. So, for me, even though he was a painter of still lifes, Morandi was a religious painter. That fascinated me.” ^[12]

The Morandian lesson of the “transmutation of the ordinary into the transcendent” had numerous developments throughout Magno’s career. After returning to Brazil following the Morandian phase, and newly arrived in São Paulo, Magno created the first paintings in the Morandi series (1964). He then revisited the series in the 1970s and 2000s, developing brighter versions. The artist considers the original chromaticism of this series, with its soft tones, to be lunar.

Although the series began in the same year as the visit to Bologna, it does not share a palette or themes with Morandi's work. Instead, it features arrangements of geometric shapes with softened edges floating among shades of blue, green, and lilac. It is evident that Magno had already absorbed the Morandian lesson. He was not imitating the Italian’s work but engaging with his philosophical perspective, from which Magno derived a keenly perceptive stance toward life—within which, to cite Byung-Chul Han, “the creating hand does not act. It listens.”^[13]

It is within this horizon of openly listening to the world that, as the 1970s approached, Magno began to pay attention to the geometries around him—in sidewalks, market stalls, house façades, and patchwork quilts. His Morandian “transcendence of the ordinary” would not emerge through still life but through popular constructivist traditions. Although these practices were widespread in Pernambuco, they remained invisible to many artists of that era, who, considering themselves “erudite,” were primarily interested in narrative and folkloristic interpretations of so-called “popular culture,” as Magno explains:

In the 1970s, in parallel with the Armorial Movement, I began my constructivist work on popular art. In the Armorial, there is nothing constructivist; they reject that, but I don’t. I see popular geometry as something highly advanced, a very sophisticated aesthetic. Examples of geometric constructivist popular art are impressive because they look like Frank Stella, Paul Klee... It’s something done intuitively, but it has an international flavor.^[14]

In this context, Montez created the four cycles of the Barracas do Nordeste [Stalls of the Northeast] series (1972–1993) ^[15] and its subsets Tacos e Mastros [Blocks and Masts], further developing this research in Teares de Timbaúba [Looms of Timbaúba] (1979–1998), Portas de Taquaritinga [Doors of Taquaritinga] (1983), and Fachadas do Nordeste [Façades of the Northeast] (1996). The vibrant colors of Barracas led the artist to describe the series as “solar,” emphasizing what he called the “antithesis” to the lunar quality of the Morandi series.[16] This aspect was noted by Aracy Amaral during the exhibition O popular como matriz [The Popular as Matrix], held at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP in 1985. The critic seemed to revive the debate on constructivist color that, three decades earlier, had prompted Waldemar Cordeiro to label Cícero Dias's work as “hedonistic” and of “gratuitous taste,”^[17] a clear manifestation of the aesthetic prejudice that resurfaced in Amaral's reference to a supposed “civilized ‘good taste’”^[18] —a bias that persists to this day.

Equally “constructivist”^[19] in nature, and similarly “solar”, is the Tantra series (1963–2006). Magno explained that its reference was less to Tantric philosophy and more to Tantric art, which the artist discovered through books in the early 1970s.^[20] In this extensive series, the iconography of lingam and yoni, along with their respective energies, is explored in paintings, objects, and sculptures that do not follow a specific scheme but continuously reinvent ways to perform their geometry, synthesis, and duality—archetypal principles that, being more onto-cosmic than aesthetic, take on different forms, patterns, colors, designs, materials, and scales in each work.

Tantric art, considered one of the essential forms of yoga, is a practice that connects us with the universality that constitutes us and reveals our place within it. This sense of cosmic belonging arises when the “Tantric yogin [makes] himself a part of the mystery, live in it and as well as with it,”^[21] achieving a complete identification between different states of being through deep concentration and inner contemplation. This practice of visualization, according to Ananda Coomaraswamy quoted by Mookerjee, “is identical in worship and in art.”^[22]

It was precisely this inseparability between individuality and the cosmic dimension of existence that resonated with Magno: “I became interested in Tantric art because its motto is ‘in multiplicity, there is unity.’”^[23] Unsurprisingly, his work features cosmic elements such as constellations, moons, skies, black holes, clouds, and galaxies, as seen in A Terra não é azul  [The Earth Is Not Blue] (1972), now on display in the Galeria Galatea exhibition.

Through his encounter with Morandi—the painter of everyday objects, Magno connected, via contemplation, with the spiritual dimension inherent in bottles, glasses, and jugs. The artist from Pernambuco began to value, sometimes with radical choices in his materials, everyday situations, mundanities, ordinary knick-knacks, and even waste—such as in the Latas [Cans] series (1987–1989)—not just because they could be seen as potentially artistic in a Duchampian sense, but because, in a Morandian and fundamental way, they could serve as “aesthetic technologies” for reaching cosmic awareness, provided they were approached contemplatively:

When a person creates works of this nature, even if they do not see themselves as religious in an Eastern sense, the act of creating these paintings and objects already carries a strong tantric significance. When the Buddhist monk paints a mandala he engages in a religious practice that leads him to meditation and contemplation. (...) The practice of making these objects itself brings me a great sense of empathy and connection. However, it’s not enough for the artist to simply create the mandala to achieve this empathy. It’s the same when a Christian painter wants to depict an annunciation or Christ, but the result doesn’t convey anything. (...) The viewer must also have this connection; otherwise, they will not feel anything. There needs to be a communion between the work and the viewer. ^[24]

From Morandi, Magno learned about the contemplative in the ordinary, and the cosmic in the particular, and gained another insight: there are “monolithic” artists (those “who narrow their practice,” moving in a seemingly singular direction) and those who are “chameleonic,” constantly evolving in their making. In Magno’s view, Morandi was monolithic, while Magno saw himself as chameleonic—"I have always been chameleonic. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it’s just how I am.”

Magno’s intense admiration for the monolithic Morandi seems to confirm the tantric duality or, in the artist's terms, the relationship between multiplicity and unity. This sheds light on Morandi's chameleonic becoming and, fundamentally, the monolithic transversality of Montez Magno's work, whose diverse aesthetic and poetic qualities may have early on reflected his awareness of the radical—profound, extensive, and sometimes astonishing—unity of life:

I can't stand the silence

outside of me.

The sedated spirit

needs a thousand trumpets

to dream.^[25]