After a period studying engraving in New York, in the mid-1960s Antonio Henrique Amaral began incorporating the aesthetic icons of Brazilian mass culture into his work. Standing out from this period is a series of paintings that depict bananas—often composed with forks, plates, ropes, and flags — produced between 1968 and 1975. Bananas may be a reference to Brazil’s status as an exporter of low value-added products — a socalled “banana republic” — or the very idea of banality (of evil or violence). At the same time, Amaral revisits the modernist theme of representing national symbols through pop art conventions, though less through the repetition of a cultural icon — the banana — but rather in variously depicting bananas being tied, cut, hung, or rotting away. In his almost magical hyper-realism, based on photographic compositions, Amaral’s work is full of irony and critiques of Brazil’s reigning authoritarianism. The Campo de batalha [Battlefield] series (1973-1974), produced during one of the most violent periods of the Brazilian military dictatorship, stems from his research with bananas, now punctured by the metals of repression. In the series, everything takes place in the foreground, like close-ups of terror. Produced while Amaral was exiled in the United States, the paintings depict these bananas, which can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the human body, as frayed and bruised. In addition to yellow, Amaral also introduces grays and blacks. Campo de batalha 32 [Battlefield 32] (1974), the penultimate work of this series, is a large-scale painting showing a close-up of a fork driving into a mass of rotten bananas. In this piece, the fork’s prongs also suggest prison bars.
— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018
