16.7.2026
11 AM – 11:30 AM
INTRODUCTION
Regina Teixeira de Barros, Coordinating Curator and Collection Curator, MASP.
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Round table
GÊNESE ANDRADE
“An Ongoing Question”: Flávio de Carvalho and the Portraits of Modernists
From 1927 onwards, Flávio de Carvalho became acquainted with Geraldo Ferraz, Mário de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Patrícia Galvão, Sérgio Milliet, and other modernist artists. The coexistence was intense and long-lasting, recorded in the crossed views between their portraits by Flávio and the texts written by the artist and those portrayed—both articles about each other’s works, as well as varied comments that complement each other and foster reflection. In this game of mirrors between the “essential manifestation of the model” and the “inner world of the artist”, the images take us by surprise due to the diversity of methods, techniques, styles, expressions, and gestures. What do these “psychological portraits”—“voluptuous forms on canvas”—reveal about the relationships of this modernist group, and what do they represent in the extensive production of this “ideal anthropophagist”? Considering what Flávio draws from the subject, what the latter offers, and what the artist projects of himself, how can we decipher these disturbing portraits?
THIAGO GIL
Between Voids and Lines of Force: Archeology and Psychoanalysis in Flávio de Carvalho’s oeuvre
Archeology and psychoanalysis were two fields of modern knowledge that influenced Flávio de Carvalho’s intellectual experience as an artist-researcher. In his library, now preserved at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (State University of Campinas – UNICAMP), there are several volumes of the British Museum’s publications on its archaeological collections, especially from the Middle East. The books were possibly acquired during his time as a civil engineering student in Durham, before his return and settlement in São Paulo in the early 1920s. There is also a significant amount of psychoanalytic works by authors such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank. For Carvalho, both were sciences of fragment and ruin, operating above all in the voids of time, in what personal and collective memory may access only by relinquishing a linear and mechanical idea of time. In this talk, I discuss how Carvalho used archeology and psychoanalysis in his creative practice, particularly as a writer and portraitist, pursuing a notion of ancient time that would emerge in the present in affective exchanges with images and other bodies.
Mediated by: Regina Teixeira de Barros, Coordinating Curator and Collection Curator, MASP.
1 PM – 2 PM
Break
2 PM – 4 PM
Round table
VERÔNICA STIGGER
Psychoethnography: Flávio de Carvalho’s Wild Research Method
In “A única arte que presta é a arte anormal” [The only good art is abnormal art], an essay published in the Diário de S. Paulo on September 24, 1936, Flávio de Carvalho proposed the creation of a new method of study, psychoethnograhy, which combined then nascent ethnography with psychoanalysis. This is a method the artist had been employing since at least Experiência n. 2 [Experience No. 2], carried out in the middle of a Corpus Christi procession. In this talk, we will see how this very specific method of action and thought developed by Carvalho is constructed. This is a method that seems somewhat crazy or wild in the double sense that, on the one hand, it drives the science on which it is based crazy and, on the other, it functions by assembling fragments.
MARCELO MORESCHI
History and the Dangers of Controversy
What type of history or historiography would allow us to think of Flávio de Carvalho not as a marginal eccentricity, but as a friction point capable of throwing the narratives of modernity and the avant-garde in Brazil into disarray? What dismantling of the categories “Brazilian modernism” and “22,” as well as their historiography and commonplaces, would it require or engender? The centenary of Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week] showed the limits of revisionist actions: even disruption is eventually reabsorbed by the repositioning of the landmark. As a speculative exercise, this talk uses Carvalho’s psychoethnography—envisioned as a surrogate for aesthetics and art history—and his idea of a 20th-century culture graph to devise another writing of modern art in Brazil. In this approach, Carvalho’s formulation of a History that, threatened by controversy, finds itself in a safe position, helps to redescribe the narcissistic stabilization of modernism and allows testing within these limits a less stabilized and naturalized history, more attentive to the dangers of friction and ongoing invention.
LUIZ CAMILLO OSORIO
Flávio de Carvalho: Experience as Process and Body
Flávio de Carvalho was a powerhouse of transgressive ideas within a poetically unassuming modernism. He made the notion of experience a key link between art and politics. Working on the boundaries between languages and territories, he randomly deconstructed any claim to specificity in the means of expression. Everything spoke in his work, since the body was given a role of performative impulse. Body as experience and experience as body. Without making concessions of any kind, Carvalho was above all a loner. Despite being a founding member and the main driving force of the Clube de Arte Moderna (CAM) in São Paulo in the early 1930s, his oeuvre was always marginalized. In a way, this place on the margins is what interests us from the perspective of an interpretation in the light of the present. We will begin by addressing what was perhaps the most striking and unique “performance” of his career, Experiência n. 2 [Experience No. 2] from 1931. Conspiratorial will, risk, delirium, and insolence were seen in it. In a São Paulo that was still deeply parochial, he chose to test the limits of tolerance of a religious mass of people wounded in their behavioral codes. During a Corpus Christi procession, he wore an eye-catching green velvet cap and walked cheekily against the flow of believers. After a period of seeming invisibility and tolerated discomfort, he decided to launch into intentional defiance. Result: he only escaped a lynching through police intervention. The poetic unfoldings of this act move from anthropology to the arts, without giving up the political potential derived from this non-place of work. This talk will focus, among other aspects, on thinking about the political force of this non-place or these heterogeneous places that his oeuvre opens and displaces. Taking Experiência n. 2 as a starting point, passing through the Teatro da Experiência [Theater of Experience] (1933) and New Look (1955), we will address what is made overt as the transience between art and life, between experimentation and experience.
Mediated by: Mateus Nunes, Assistant Curator, MASP.
Seminário