Before he became one of Latin America’s most prolific filmmakers — with more than 80 movies credited to his production company — Luiz Carlos Barreto was a photographer. For 15 years beginning in the late 1940s, he worked for O Cruzeiro, a Brazilian weekly magazine similar to Life or Look traveling all over Latin America and also working as a correspondent in Europe.

Luiz Carlos Barreto, "Paris", 1953

Mr. Barreto, now 83, was in New York recently for the United States premiere of “Lula, Son of Brazil,” his company’s latest film, directed by his son Fábio. But back home in Brazil, his early photographic work has been getting renewed attention. A book of his photos called “Passagem: A Memória Visual de Luiz Carlos Barreto,” or “Passage: The Visual Memory of Luiz Carlos Barreto,”was published a decade ago.  And his work has been featured in retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived since the 1940s, and at the Museum of Art in São Paulo.

His images range from gritty depictions of Brazil’s urban and rural poor, especially from the sertão, or arid backlands of the northeast, Mr. Barreto’s home region, to celebrity portraits: Mr. Barreto covered the first Cannes film festival in 1954 and later shot stars like Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak and Sophia Loren. But he also photographed global political figures ranging from Che Guevara and Nikita Khrushchev to Latin American presidents.

via Luiz Carlos Barreto and Tropical Light – NYTimes.com.

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Gilvan Samico, "Criação - Homem e Mulher", 1993

Gilvan José Meira Lins Samico (Recife, Pernambuco, 1928- ). Engraver, painter, draughtsman, lecturer. In 1952, together with other artists, Gilvan Samico founded the Ateliê Coletivo [Collective Studio] of the Sociedade de Arte Moderna do Recife – SAMR [Recife Modern Art Society], conceived by Abelardo da Hora (1924).

Gilvan studied wood engraving with Lívio Abramo (1903 – 1992) in 1957 at the Escola de Artesanato [School of Crafts] of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM/SP [São Paulo Museum of Modern Art]. In the following year, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he studied engraving with Oswaldo Goeldi (1895 – 1961) at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes – Enba [National School of Fine Arts]. With a great technical mastery, he dedicated himself in his work to textures elaborated with linear rhythms.

In 1965, he settled in Olinda, lecturing in wood engraving at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba – UFPA [Federal University of Paraíba]. In 1968, with the foreign travel prize won at the 17th Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna [National Salon of Modern Art], he spent two years in Europe. In 1971, he was invited by Ariano Suassuna to join the Movimento Armorial [Armorial Movement], directed towards popular Northeastern culture and the literature of the Cordel.

Gilvan Samico

His output is marked by the recovery of the poetry of the Northeast through the Cordel literature and the creative use of wood engravings. His engravings are populated by biblical and other figures deriving from myths and local stories, as well as fantastic and mythical animals. With the presentation of new subject matter, he introduced a formal simplification into his work, reducing the use of colour and textures.

Samico has works in the MoMA in New York and participated twice in the Venice Biennale with an award in one of them.

via Samico, Gilvan (1928- ).

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Luciano Deos to preside Cannes Lions 2011 Design category

Brazilian designer, architect and brand specialist Luciano Deos has been named Jury President for the Design category of the Cannes Lions 2011, the 58th International Festival of Creativity that takes place from 19 to 25 June at Cannes in France.

Founder and president of Brazilian branding agency Gad’ and current president of Abedesign, the Brazilian Association of Design Companies, Deos had won numerous awards at Cannes Lions, New York Festivals and IF Design.

He had previously served in the Cannes Lions Jury, as did other Brazilian professionals such as Fred Gelli, Eco Moliterno, Fábio Fernandes and Alexandre Peralta.

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Composite of "Where is My Vote?" posters by Rico Lins and Yomar Augusto

Brazilian graphic designers Rico Lins and Yomar Augusto are among the 140 graphic artists that take part in “Where is my vote?”, a poster exhibition for the Green Movement in Iran presented in New York, at the Visual Arts Gallery (601 West 26th Street, 15th floor), from August 30th – September 25th, 2010.

Based on a curatorial concept by Green Bird and organized by Steven Heller, Anita Kunz, Woody Pirtle and Francis Di Tommaso in collaboration with Andrea Rauch, the exhibition features works of renowned international designers such as Milton Glaser, Isidro Ferrer, Seymour Chwast, Alain Le Quernec, Michael Vanderbill, Ralph Steadman, Massimo Vignelli and Ivan Chermayeff.

Posters can be seen at http://public.sva.edu/eblast/0099/web.html

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OS GÊMEOS A mural by two Brazilian graffiti artists who call themselves Os Gêmeos has burst upon a corner of Houston Street and the Bowery (photo: Justin Maxon/The New York Times)

Which is to say that their fantastic, epic mural, on a concrete wall about 17 feet high and about 51 feet long, is light and frothy, a dream of happiness with an underlying chord of melancholy. And everything in it is exquisitely fine-tuned and detailed, a dazzlement of effortless technique that sustains long bouts of close looking. It will remain up until March.

The delicate black lines that thread throughout the entire image like drizzled charcoal dust are feats of spray-can painting. The prismatic color of everything else has a saturation unusual in graffiti art. The sky alone is half a spectrum. It begins with deep blue green at the top and descends through green and chartreuse to a golden, sunbathed yellow that serves as land, water, light, human skin and more.

And the storybook imagery is out of this world, yet not. Sure, people and things often levitate or are impossibly stacked, and the setting is a tad unreal — simultaneously wet and dry, or hard and spongy. But both the subways of New York and the favelas of São Paulo are here, and the figures wear brightly patterned garments (thanks to ingenious small-bore stenciling) that seem truly Brazilian. Plus, there are enough fish to placate the fish lovers of both cities. Sometimes these creatures have scales of many colors. Often they carry something in their mouths, like the bringers of good luck they are supposed to be: radiant little shacks, people or heads, whole figures. It’s magical realism with a touch of grit.

While the onslaught of figures, episodes and colors is at first overwhelming, a casual left-to-right reading suggests some narrative possibilities. Basically what we have here is a tale of escape and growth that begins in darkness and — after taking a few tips from the Bible, Hieronymus Bosch and M. C. Escher — ends in a stunning vortex of brilliant color. At far left, in the gray dimness of a narrow, cell-like space, a small figure strains toward the golden light seeping through a chink in the wall. Wearing pants, a jacket and a girlish scalloped bonnet and shouldering a bag, she’s leaving home, as the song says. A small spotted dog watches from the safety of a tenderly, elaborately wood-grained floor.

Through the chink the golden world awaits, arrayed around and above what seems to be a nearly circular waterfall; it’s a world populated by spirit guides, with or without gills. And it all adds up, or at least it is all visibly linked. You’re supposed to keep going, from one thing to the next, gaining wisdom along the way.

To sketch in some of the action, the connections begin with a boy on a four-poster bed (Dreamland’s point of origin) with a peacock on his back, using a second peacock as an ear trumpet. He listens to a whale whose skin, a mosaic of blues, is dotted with extra eyes. Atop the whale lies a girl (maybe our heroine, but older) so relaxed that the dots on her lavender-pink blouse are rising into the atmosphere like bubbles. The whale’s tail hooks over the rail of a snaking subway track, while the beast itself balances on a stack of three figures teetering on a rope bridge with iffy wood slats (San Luis Rey, anyone?) extending from one side of the waterfall to the other. (Don’t ask.)

Back on the tracks a subway car — the N train — is straddled by a large boy, who has human heads gathered around him like the day’s catch and a galleon on his head. A fish that is also a dirigible on its side is anchored to his hand. (Behind all this stretches a yellow out-of-focus landscape where the hills are faces.)

Next we are in the city where two boys who could be Os Gêmeos (Portuguese for the Twins, which the 35-year-old Pandolfo brothers are) are cramped inside a two-story, two-room house. The tracks continue into a station with an Escher-like mural of bright checkerboards receding to a vanishing point, and also the tag of Dash Snow, a New York graffiti artist who died last month and to whom the mural is dedicated.

The station is also part of a boat (touring the waterfalls?), with plush red seats tufted with yellow faces. At the front of the boat, next to a protective figurehead, sits a knowing young woman looking out at us amid bundles of patterned fabric. She has little houses in her green-and-black hair and wears a blouse whose planetlike dots are, this time, staying put.

The final third of the mural explodes in the rainbow vortex that is fabulously explicit in color but physically indeterminate. Sometimes it is a beach at low tide, sometimes a prison wall, sometimes quicksand, at least for a figure carrying a grandfather clock. Also here is a small Trojan horse (or maybe a mule), which brings back the lovely wood grain in warmer colors. Its neck is open and forms a double cameo for the faces of a boy and girl.

This telling omits many wonderful details. One of the best is front and nearly center in the image: a boy who seems to sit on a waterspout, wearing a fish mask and a T-shirt that is one of the painting’s best moments. It depicts a landscape: note the white stenciled stone wall, the changing greens of the tiny stenciled trees, the golden setting sun. It is an idyll of pastoral, escape-from-the-city living, cottage and all.

via Art Review – Os Gêmeos – Os Gêmeos, Brazilian Graffiti Artists, Create a World on a New York Wall – NYTimes.com.

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Supermodel Gisele takes Sky Brasil viewers on a fantasy HD tour (from Advertising Age)

Sky Brasil

Brazil’s biggest satellite TV service, owned 76% by DirectTV and 24% by Brazilian media giant Organizações Globo, launched Sky High Definition TV channels with great fanfare in 2009. One ad, by São Paulo agency Giovanni DraftFCB, brings HDTV to life with Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen in a São Paulo airport departure lounge. Perched on a red sofa, she clicks a remote control and a football team swarms the lounge. Another click and soldiers are fighting a war. With a final click, a New York City taxi appears in a flurry of snowflakes and Ms. Bundchen hops in and rides off.

Hyundai Brasil

In a market dominated by Volkswagen and Fiat, Hyundai arrived late but has been growing fast from a small base. Sales doubled to 43,000 cars in 2008, and were projected to climb to 70,000 units last year. And Hyundai last fall revived plans to start building a $600 million plant in Brazil in 2010. Working with Havas-owned agency Z Plus, Hyundai advertised heavily to launch the i30 and the Tucson, one of the best-selling imported vehicles in Brazil, and promote the Azera. In one campaign, Tucson owners were asked if they knew why the Tucson had been named the best SUV in Brazil and the world. Most of them didn’t, but were happy to volunteer their own reasons for liking the car.

HSBC Brasil

Brazil is the largest Latin American market for HSBC, which livened up its marketing last year with the $40 million launch of HSBC Direct online banking for busy people with a campaign from JWT, São Paulo, using the slogan “The bank that likes to get straight to the point.” The site drew 1.1 million visitors to HSBC’s website to open a new online bank account.

"Havaianas Verão", by Marcello Serpa's Almap BBDO

Outstanding Agencies of the Year

Marcello Serpa’s shop Almap BBDO again led Adlatina’s ranking of most-awarded agencies in Latin America with colorful work for clients like Havaianas flip-flops.

via Advertising: The Best of Latin American Marketing in 2009 – Global News – Advertising Age.

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Helio Oiticica's "Homage to Mondrian" (Photo by Michael Stravato for The New York Times)

Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 1937 – idem, 1980). Together with his brother, César Oiticica, Hélio began studying painting and drawing with Ivan Serpa at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – MAM/RJ [Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro], in 1954. In the same year, he wrote his first text on the visual arts, after which, his recording in writing of reflections on art and his output became a habit. He took part in the Grupo Frente [Frente Group] in 1955 and 1956, and in 1959, became a member of the Neoconcrete Group. He abandoned his two-dimensional works and created spatial reliefs, bolides [fireballs/meteors], capes, standards, tents and penetrables.

In 1964, he began to make the so-called Manifestações Ambientais [Environmental Demonstrations]. At the opening of the Opinião 65 [Opinion 65] show, at the MAM/RJ, he protested when entry to the museum was denied to his friends, members of the Mangueira samba school, and he was expelled from the museum, holding a collective demonstration in front of it, in which the Parangolés were worn by his samba school friends. He took part in the Opinião 66 [Opinion 66] and Nova Objetividade Brasileira [New Brazilian Objectivity], presenting the Tropicália environmental demonstration. In 1968, he held the collective demonstration, Apocalipopótese [Apocalypopothesis] on the Aterro do Flamengo [Flamengo Land Reclamation Project], which included his Parangolés and Lygia Pape‘s Ovos [Eggs]. In 1969, at the Whitechapel Gallery, in London, he realised what he called the Whitechapel Experience, presenting the Éden [Eden] project.

For most of the 1970s, he lived in New York, during which period, he was a visiting scholar of the Guggenheim Foundation, taking part in the Information show, at the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA. He returned to Brazil in 1978. After his death, the Projeto Hélio Oiticica [Hélio Oiticica Project] was created in Rio de Janeiro, in 1981, with the aim of preserving, analysing and promoting his work, under the direction of Lygia Pape, Luciano Figueiredo and Waly Salomão.

Between 1992 and 1997, the Projeto HO staged a major retrospective that was presented in the cities of Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Minneapolis and Rio de Janeiro. In 1996, the Secretaria Municipal de Cultura do Rio de Janeiro [Municipal Secretariat of Culture of Rio de Janeiro] established the Centro de Artes Hélio Oiticica [Hélio Oiticica Centre for the Arts], to house the entire collection of the artist and open it to the public.

via Oiticica, Hélio (1937 – 1980).

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"Corallo Chair", by Humberto and Fernando Campana, 2004

The Museum of Modern Art’s Design Store has been running regionally-sourced collections in their retails shops and online. Currently they’ve got an excellent array of products from Korea, and next up they’ll be bringing work from Brazil.

Spanning time periods, there’s also a mix of old and new, including the classic Mocho Stool from Sergio Rodrigues. The 1954 design interprets the traditional milkmaid’s stool used throughout Brazil, using the same local eucalyptus wood of the original. Representing Brazil’s contemporary national identity, the Campana Brothers‘ keep it modern with their new sushi bowl, a kaleidoscope of colors and materials rolled together in a manner implied by the name.

Playing to Brazil’s strengths, the exclusive collection is heavy on handmade objects that take advantage of indigenous natural resources, such as this centipede-inspired fruit bowl composed of coconut fibers, sugar cane and wood.

The Brazil collection will be available for a limited time via the MoMA Design Store website and brick-and-mortar shop or at MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires).A short preview of the collection follows as a slideshow.

via Brazilian Design at the MoMA Store – Products – Dwell and MoMA Design Store Destination: Brazil

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Interaction | South America '09

The Interaction’09 | South America will happen on 26,27 and 28 November at 9 am to 18 pm, in São Paulo.

The event aims to present and discuss the main lines of research in the design of interaction, promote the network among professionals in the community, presenting and promoting the discipline in many circles of knowledge: design, computer science, architecture, indicating that interdisciplinary and plurality of views are the way we act.

The purpose of the event is to encourage and work with the education of interaction design in Latin America, so has the support of several institutions of higher education, promoting greater visibility for professionals engaged in the development of interactive solutions.

Speakers confirmed:

• Nimish Biloria – Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, The Netherlands
• Simon Biggs – Research Professor at Edinburgh College of Art, UK
• Ken Perlin – Research Professor at New York University, United States
• Juliana Ferreira – Interaction Designer at Nokia Design, UK
• Giselle Beigelman – Professor of the Communication and Semiotics Graduate Program at  Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP)
• Antonio Carlos Figueira de Mello (Superlimão)

via Interaction South America ’09.

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Premiere Brazil! 2009, the seventh annual collaboration between MoMA and the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, introduces New York audiences to original and compelling films by both new and established Brazilian filmmakers. The exhibition’s opening-night screening is the U.S. premiere of acclaimed director Bruno Barreto’s Last Stop 174, a tender and suspenseful story of human tragedy and loss set in Rio de Janeiro. Also featured are eight seminal works by Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil’s master of documentary filmmaking. Highly regarded for their formally distinguished and innovative style, Coutinho’s influential films highlight the amazing storytelling abilities of ordinary people. The Coutinho retrospective includes the world premiere of his latest film, Moscow. The festival’s annual selection of classic films celebrates the centenary of one of Brazil’s most popular composers, Villa Lobos, with a screening of the rare 1937 Humberto Mauro film The Discovery of Brazil, which features a beautiful Lobos score. Several music-filled documentaries featuring Brazil’s most beloved contemporary poets and performers form a significant component of this year’s festival, which also includes live performances of Brazilian music in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden, presented as part of MoMA Thursday Nights. All films are from Brazil and in Portuguese with English subtitles. Most first screenings will be introduced by the filmmaker(s).

via MoMA | Premiere Brazil! 2009.

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