Current practices related to Christiane Wagner’s research

MAC USP Amalgam Film

During this pandemic time, a selection of MAC USP’s Artworks was made for the film Amalgam (Amálgama) by the State of São Paulo Dance Group created in partnership with the MAC USP and the São Paulo State Symphonic Orchestra. The film resulted from the dialogue between painting, sculpture, dance, music, and fashion. This is an extraordinary moment for the MAC USP Art Collection.

The artworks’ selection aims to foster artistic languages’ hybridization and reevaluate the MAC USP Art Collection while stimulating the audience to an aesthetic experience in a new way. Christiane Wagner was invited to participate of this artworks selection and the artist selected was Kozo Mio, who is presented to the public with the following essay (Portuguese and English versions):

Kozo Mio, Perspective in Space C (1970) by Christiane Wagner, MAC USP

Among the great exhibitions Kozo Mio held in Japan, we have records of his participation in the Bienal de São Paulo, which consequently had repercussions in New York, as reported by art critic John Canaday in The New York Times, with particular attention to the case of the Guggenheim Museum. Furthermore, he had his solo show organized by Bonino Gallery in New York and Bonino Gallery in Rio de Janeiro. […] Today, we can find Kozo Mio’s works at the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). […] To think about these influences of Western art in Mio’s work is to remember that, besides these well-known interpretations about Perspective in space C, the origin of this primary technique that gives name to his work is not precisely in Japanese culture and art, but in the West, in the Italian Renaissance. “Perspective is the process by which we arrive at proportion, that is to say, at beauty or the perfection of art”—that’s how the Italian architecture historian Giulio Carlo Argan put the ideal of Renaissance architecture. In his essay on the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Argan analyzed the church of San Lorenzo as a construction of a succession of imaginary planes seen in perspective from the foreground to the horizon. Argan writes, “Therefore the place is a pure mental abstraction, the precondition for the representation of space…In fact, the plane in Brunelleschi’s architecture is an ‘intersection’ and not a surface; it is the place onto which the various spatial distances are projected, and on which the infinite dimensions of space are reduced to the three dimensions of perspective space […].” It’s in this re-reading, based on the technique of perspective in Brunelleschi’s architecture, that we can relate the sense of perspective in Kozo Mio’s space transferred to a context of dreams, desires, and sublimations in the scenario of mass culture—in which his work refers, in his time and space, to an illusionist aesthetic with traces of pop and op arts.

The full text is available on the MAC USP’s website.