Antonio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão (Palmares, PE, 1952 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 2016). Sculptor, designer and performance artist. He makes the objects used in his works elements of performance, creating analogies between body and sculpture.
Son of the poet and writer Gerardo Melo Mourão (1917-2007) and Léa de Barros (1922-?), portrayed in the painting As Gêmeas (1940), by painter Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896-1962), he lived with literature and visual arts from an early age, experiences that marked his education.
He moved to Rio de Janeiro and, in the 1970s, began his work, which is close to the production of artists from different branches of Brazilian contemporary art, such as Cildo Meireles (1948), Waltercio Caldas (1946), and José Resende (1945). The relationship between representation, language, and reality, a key theme for this generation of artists, is present in many of the sculptor's works. In these works, body and desire become active components of the investigation, in which items from other areas of knowledge are included, such as literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, theater, mathematics, physics, and biology.
In 1974, he finished his degree in architecture and urbanism at Santa Úrsula University. In the same year, he holds his first solo exhibition, Museu da Masturbação Infantil, at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), where he exhibits sets of drawings marked by a "mental eroticism": a kind of reflective attitude around human desire, in which the forms do not represent anything specific, but sexual tension can be inferred in ambiguous phallic suggestions or in the titles of the works.
In the objects and sculptures, forms and materials intertwine, in analogy to copulation, updating the surrealists' proposal that, in poems and works, words would make love. According to English critic Guy Brett (1942), through immersion in matter and the physical world, Tunga establishes "a surprising and unexpected analogy or meeting point between 'sculptural' energies and those of the human body." [1]
In constructing his work, Tunga operates at the intersection between object, performance, and text. His sculptures construct narratives and assume texts are components. Moreover, the objects used in performances figure as detonating agents of processes. Even in exhibition spaces, the objects take on a performative dimension, like residues or dejects of a certain action left in the environment. The artist calls these objects "instaurations", an overlapping between the artistic categories of "action"-belonging to the universe of performance and theater-and "installation"-objects set up in an exhibition space-in order to include them as part of the artistic experience.
In the following years he collaborated for the magazine Malasartes and the independent journal A Parte do Fogo, both of which were short-lived[2]. In 1981, he was part of the 16th Bienal de São Paulo, where he presented the installation-film Ão. The 16mm film builds the projection on an imaginary torus inside the Dois Irmãos tunnel (currently Zuzu Angel tunnel), in Rio de Janeiro. This projection is accompanied by the repetition of a passage of the song Night and Day, by composer Cole Porter (1891-1964), sung by Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), creating the sensation of an infinite journey.
In October 1985, he published an insert in the magazine Revirão 2 - Revista da Prática Freudiana, with images of the performance Xifópagas Capilares (1984), accompanied by a narrative about the origin of the work. The relationship that Tunga's texts maintain with the other dimensions of the work is exemplified in this production, since the booklet contains photographs of a series of works made in the early 1980s, such as Les bijoux de Mme. De Sade (1982); Troféu (1984); Toros, joias de Mme. De Sade (1983), photographs from the performance Xifópagas Capilares and photograms from the film Ão.The images seem to illustrate small passages of the text that closes the booklet. The narrative presents, on the one hand, the style of a scientific report, and, on the other hand, approaches the fantastic Latin American literature, such as that of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Throughout the text there are references to objects created by Tunga, which give them an origin and produce a link between them that goes beyond form. Although it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between text and objects, it is possible to state that, at the same time that the pieces seem to have emerged from within the text, they are the ones that feed the dynamics of the narrative. In this way, text and works configure a continuous system that suspends the limits between literature, performance and object, launching itself into the speculative field of language.
The notion of a continuous system allows us to understand that the symbolic dimension of Tunga's objects does not lead to the idea of a uniform whole, of which each individual piece is a part. Rather, each piece, each text, and each action refers to a continuous production of forms and narratives, which extend themselves without any evident beginning or purpose. The artist's interest in the mathematical figure of the torus-which appears in the film-installation Aõ-also comes from this conception: being a product of the rotation of a circular surface around a circumference, the torus also configures a continuous system.
Tunga's continuous systems have an origin: the phantasmatic space between body and psyche. This space obeys a singular temporality and spatiality, dominated by erotic impulses and unconscious combinations. Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo (1964) defines this movement as "a tendency to overflow and to profusion mediated by a delicate sense of balance and composition,"[3] which he also calls "baroque tension."
Tunga understands the continuous systems of sculptures he creates as elements that unfold in space, organizing it in an experience that involves body and mind. They are objects that have the power to bring out the poetic force of gestures, as Ronaldo Brito suggests when referring to works like Trança (1984).
If among the materials most used at the beginning of his career are iron, steel, brass, lamps, chains, magnets, felt, and rubber, from the 1990s on Tunga has been exploring more organic and fluid materials, such as the gelatin that covers the bells in Cadentes Lácteos (1994), or the makeup paste with which seven girls participating in the action Floresta Sopão (2002) cover objects and their own bodies.
Tunga is one of the first contemporary artists to exhibit at the Louvre Museum, Paris, with the work À Luz de Dois Mundos (2005). Later, in 2012, he inaugurated a space dedicated to his production, the Galeria Psicoativa, located at Instituto Inhotim in the city of Brumadinho, Minas Gerais. His works are part of important national and international museum collections.
In 2016, the posthumous exhibition Pálpebras opens at Galeria Millan, with new works. The following year, he joins the sequence of exhibitions on sexuality held at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp) with Tunga: O Corpo em Obras.
Notes
1. BRETT, Guy. Tunga: tudo simultaneamente presente. In: MACIEL, Katia (Org.). Brasil experimental: arte/vida, proposições e paradoxos. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa Livraria, 2005.
2. Rio de Janeiro publications dedicated to modern art production in Brazil. The magazine Malasartes publishes three issues, between the years 1975 and 1976. The journal A Parte do Fogo has a single issue, published in 1980.
3. BASUALDO, Carlos. Exhibition catalogue: Tunga 1977-1997. Caracas: Fundación Museo Alejandro Otero, 1998.
TUNGA . In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa376775/tunga>. Accessed on: 25 Jun. 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7