Sandra Cinto: From Ideas in the Head To Eyes on the Sky

Cover image: Sandra Cinto 2

São Paulo, 2020

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Production team

editorial coordination Carlos Costa editing HeloĂ­sa Iaconis and Milena Buarque editorial board Ana de FĂĄtima Sousa, Carlos Costa, Juliano Ferreira, Paulo Herkenhoff, Rodrigo Linhares and Sofia Fan graphic design Helga Vaz editorial production Luciana Araripe proofreading supervisor Polyana Lima proofreading Rachel Reis (outsourced) translation into English John Norman

A wave that stops and becomes a mountain, but which upon becoming a mountain continues to be water. The lines by Pernambucan poet João Cabral de Melo Neto in “Imitação das Águas” seem to translate into words the work by Sandra Cinto.

Tracing a choreography in space, in the definition of the artist herself, her drawings explore the intimate, beauty, the sublime, enchantment and, thus, curiosity. It is art for opening – rather than closing.

In Sandra Cinto: das Ideias na Cabeça aos Olhos no Céu [Sandra Cinto: From Ideas in the Head To Eyes on the Sky], curator Paulo Herkenhoff and Itaú Cultural (IC) present an overview of 30 years of production by this artist, born in the 1960s in the city of Santo André in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area. Divided on three floors, the show arranges Cinto’s work like the different densities and forms of water: initial and primordial references and dialogues established by the artist like rain; the ideas gaining material form like a light drizzle; and, finally, the ethereal, reflected in a literal way in Cinto’s skies, like a cloud.

With this exhibition, Itaú Cultural lends continuity to a series of solo shows, fulfilling its commitment to put the public into contact with Brazilian artistic productions. In 2020, Itaú Cultural will dedicate its exhibition programming to the creative vigor and work of women artists, whose works are essential for the country’s cultural formation.

Sandra Cinto’s work is essentially autobiographical. Her life, according to the artist herself, is “education all the time.” There is no dissociation between the process of teaching and learning and her artistic career. This publication, therefore, presents references, concepts and images that seem to pervade Cinto’s process of poetic creation and development, always taking care to mention and share the importance of knowledge.

Itaú Cultural

Sandra Cinto’s Art from Multiple Viewpoints Paulo Herkenhoff

Sandra Cinto was born in 1968, in the city of Santo André, in the São Paulo metropolitan region, in a working-class family. This social background was to mark her ethical positioning throughout her artistic career, now spanning 30 years. With a critical view of history, the artist values her work with the material (Homo faber), rigorous symbolic economy, the invention of language, the emancipatory mission of art and its didactic potential, a generous relation with the public, and the search for art’s place in the social space. Cinto often conceives artworks for public spaces as a way of broadening access to art.

Held at Itaú Cultural between March and May 2020, the show Sandra Cinto: das Ideias na Cabeça aos Olhos no Céu proposes three focuses on three floors, which are in turn subdivided into special focuses or zones: (a) the 2nd sublevel, or Rain, which features projects, studies, scale models and notes that present the artist’s method of working on the multiple faces and elements of her agenda, including education; (b) the 1st sublevel, or Drizzle, which features the first objects produced by Cinto (paintings, boxes, sensorial experiences and historical references) and the material complexity of her works; and (c) floor 1, or Fog, which features the artist’s skies and presents her vision of the universe.

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Rain

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Art is a mental thing, said Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance.

The true artist is an inventor. What goes on in an artist’s head during the process of developing her art? How does her work method seek to lend visibility to what arises in her imagination?

How does Sandra Cinto search for the visible? How does she develop her artistic language in a personal way? Each artist has his or her own distinctive approach for organizing aesthetic thoughts and executing projects. In short, what is the path between the first thought and the art’s material existence?

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Ceramic Tiles Sandra Cinto was invited to decorate the environment of the swimming pool at Sesc Santo AndrĂŠ. The city of many factory workers is a living memory for the artist, who was born, grew up and discovered her vocation for art there. Cinto chose to use Portuguese tiles with a blue-and-white pattern, alluding to the water and with a graphic rhythm of waves that refer to the movement of people in the water. The flow of the language follows the fluidity of the water, alluding to The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Hokusai, and to the rhythmic movement of the swimmers. The space-time between physics and art, is the mark of this homage to leisure and health for everyone. For this reason, the panel was called Ondas da Democracia [Waves of Democracy].

Education Although she understands that art is autonomous, without limitations, Sandra Cinto applies it toward tasks, but without setting conditions for it. The dimension she prefers to consider for her art is that of education in the context of society.

Art and education are for the emancipation of citizenship. This gave rise to her homage to sociologist Evelyn Ioschpe and her giant work on art in education throughout Brazil. In The Great Sun, a mural made for a school for children ranging from preschool to the elementary grades, a blazing sun shines forth, golden yellow. Education is light. At a university, her intervention on an exterior façade refers to the radiation of knowledge (The Invisible Telescope). Cinto honors the book and the teacher.

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“I have worked a lot with ceramic tiles and I like to honor the history of Brazilian tile making, such as Burle Marx, a very important reference in my work, Regina Silveira, my great teacher in the arts, Djanira, who is a fantastic woman with an impressive oeuvre, whom I much admire, and Portinari.”

“I made The Great Sun for a school in New York, in the Bronx. No matter where it is in the world, a school should be a great sun, even on sunless days, in the most complete sense of the word. The child enters the school and the first thing he or she sees is the image of a shining sun, welcoming everyone who enters that place, which is full of energy, full of light, where the first discoveries take place.”

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“The year after The Great Sun, I was invited to develop ceramic tiles for a new building in Florida, in the United States. This work is called The Invisible Telescope, which is a sky – various skies, actually – various shades of blue, with stars, as though they were various visions of the sky. I thought a lot about this concept of the university as a place that broadens our worldview, and thus this name – associating the university with a telescope.”

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The Public Square Is for the People Sandra Cinto’s work is inscribed in the Brazilian history of the freedom of art in the urban space. In the song “Um Frevo Novo,” Caetano Veloso sings that “Castro Alves Square is for the people/ Like the sky is for airplanes.”

While in “O Povo ao Poder,” the poet Castro Alves had written: “The public square! The public square is for the people/ Like the sky is for the condor.” This is the meaning of Sandra Cinto’s art in the public spaces: celebrating citizenship, because her art is also for the people. The artist travels the world and always arrives at her birth city, Santo André, where she has her square for the people.

Ateliê Fidalga In the district of Vila Madalena, in São Paulo, the artist couple Sandra Cinto and Albano Afonso have their house, their studio (on Rua Fidalga), and a third property that contains workshops and a small gallery. This complex gave rise to the Ateliê Fidalga. There, artists from all over Brazil and the world are hosted for artist residencies. Ateliê Fidalga is a meeting point for artists to debate their works, an agora of critical reflection, a factory for art production, and a place where this productive universe is presented to the public.

Biblioteca do Amor Sandra Cinto invited more than 200 artists from around the world to produce a book that would reflect the way that each one imagines love from various points of view: family, desire, human bonds, relationships between the countries, animals. This Biblioteca do Amor [Library of Love] resulted in a delicate collective architecture of feeling, open to exploration by the public and to the hope that each one will share his or her own way of thinking about love. The result is an antidote to the political and ideological processes that divide society and fuel its unrest.

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Drizzle

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This intermediary floor features artworks made over the course of Sandra Cinto’s career, which now spans three decades: from delicate initial drawings about lights and lamps, dreams, sleep and abysses, to her first paintings of skies, clouds and lighthouses. Here are musical scores and instruments displaced from their function of producing sounds to instead express silence. And studies of the anatomy of the arm, perceived as an instrument of human work. The real presence of the aesthetic objects is indispensable for mobilizing the public and for the experience of the senses.

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Zona Acústica “The eye listens,” wrote poet Paul Claudel.

Sandra Cinto’s work is inhabited by silences (as in Pausa [Pause]) and by virtual and incidental sounds. In the installation Partitura [Musical Score] thousands of pages of sheet music are crumpled by the public and accumulated. The crunching sound of papers crumpled by hands are noises that suffuse our memory. A space with internal walls in a semi-curve and drawings of musical staffs indicate the rhythm that involves the visitor. Cinto’s musical instruments, like a chamber orchestra, are scattered through this space. A cello joined to a violin by juxtaposition, formal similitude and artistic treatment by the artist results in the work Mãe e Filha [Mother and Daughter]. Águas Sandra Cinto is an artist of the waters: clouds, fog, drizzle, rains, waves, tides and swimming pools. The philosopher Luce Irigaray correlates the woman with the mechanics of fluids, for her versatility and transformation throughout life. She considers the man as being in the field of the mechanics of solids. If Cinto is the artist of flows and fluids, then watercolor, India ink and other nonviscous pigments are her materials for constructing the metaphor of water as the course of life itself. In Projeto para A Grande Chuva [Design for The Big Rain], Sandra Cinto summarizes the phenomenon through a geography of water resulting from the fall of water drops under the effect of gravity and the winds, as Lívio Abramo did with the rains of Paraguay.

Noites de Esperança, a Viagem pela Imaginação The title Noites de Esperança: a Viagem pela Imaginação [Nights of Hope: The Journey through the Imagination] is very appropriate for a work by Sandra Cinto. After surviving the shipwreck of the Raft of the Medusa and fearlessly confronting Hokusai’s wave, Cinto proposes, in Imitação da Água [Imitation of Water], a fleet of thousands of little paper boats, like a naval procession pointing to a safe horizon. The artist’s inventions do not seem to follow any predetermined course. Her art, however, involves the field of positivity of action for the Other – thus the connection between imagination and hope. All her oceanic work maps the sea of surmountings.

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History of Art Sandra Cinto’s production observes the history of art and extracts images and debates from it that can enrich her own project. She does not merely copy or cite such works, but extracts from them elements that can drive new questions. History is only interesting when it brings new density to the present. In her ecological vision of the skies and waters there are references to images developed by Théodore Géricault, Katsushika Hokusai, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Jacques-Louis David, Sol LeWitt and to the Brazilian tradition of azulejos [ceramic tiles], spanning from the colonial period to the 21st century. Now, Cinto’s challenge is: how to reinvigorate history?

The show Antarctica Artes com a Folha [Antarctica Arts with the Folha] (1996) was a mapping of the emergent production (“artists without a resume”) from all over the country. The participation of Sandra Cinto, with a group of nonsensical objects, is gathered here once again. A lamp, in a very low position, at eye level, makes it seem as though the sparkling firmament were visiting the earth. A large cage, the same size as the artist, refers to the body tamed by social rules, an aspect of biopolitics, of the domination of everyone by the societal powers. A closed box contains an image of clouds – Cinto encourages us to discover the world, because even the sky, which appears to always be there, will be another as we get to know nature better.

Anatomy The artist explores symbolic senses of the body’s motor function. Her father was an industrial worker; his arms, used in an alienating work alongside machines, became weary and ran the risk of an accident. The artist’s arm is what produces art. For Cinto, the arm is also a surface of the world (like canvases and walls), apprehended by drawing.

Sandra Cinto, the Translations Sandra Cinto’s skies are shot through by bridges and viaducts, in arcades and colonnades in peripatetic routes. Why would the cosmos need so many bridges in an unimaginable grandiosity, which unite galaxies?

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Sandra Cinto’s architectural unconscious would agree with the observations of philosopher Vilém Flusser, who said that bridges “are necessary where the universes do not overlap.

Thus, for example, when the sense of a word in another language is not in the dictionary, it is necessary to have a builder of bridges, a translator.” The construction of bridges is related to transport over the abyss and, to achieve this, it is necessary to “Dare to be free,” as Flusser proclaimed.

Réquiem para uma Montanha [Requiem for a Mountain] In “Confidência do Itabirano,” poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade reveals the nostalgia of his childhood and youth in his city and his longing for the mountains destroyed by mining: “Today [...]/ Itabira is only a photograph on the wall/ But how it hurts!” The destiny of things in capitalism is expressed in the celebrated aphorism by Marx, in which “all that is solid melts into air.” Réquiem para uma Montanha, by Sandra Cinto, consists of watery landscapes in which the earth is exhausted and breaks apart, like the memories of Drummond and wealth in capitalism.

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Fog

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The upper floor leads to the cosmos of Sandra Cinto, to her poetic vision of the universe, together with works by Albano Afonso, her husband, with whom she shares the initiative of her art studio by the name of Ateliê Fidalga. It reconstructs the code of photography, displaced from the condition of the social pact around the visual truth, removed to a situation of an object in crisis through physical operations (the drilling of holes, cuts, overlayings). Albano and Sandra share in common their focus on the sky. Here, Albano shows us a group of photographs São Paulo’s sky at different times, on different days, to extract chromatic cords from the city.

Cinto’s sky is made of spatial layers. Here we find the earth’s sky of clouds and the remote points of an imaginary universe, whose confines science is barely beginning to know. An installation in curved three-dimensional space indicates that the earth is a sphere, opposed to the obscurantist theory of the flat earth.

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Nights of Hope Sandra Cinto celebrates the adventure of vision while also attending to people with special perceptual needs. In the nocturnal scene, a stage for sleep and dreaming, every cosmic sky of the artist is a firmament of hope, it is a positive sign against our existential nyctophobia. Nyctophobia is the fear of the night and of darkness, our dread of a situation where we cannot see.

The artist is the one who leads the possible vision through the obscure night of the self. Noites de Esperança dialogues with Festa Abolicionista em Paquetá [Abolitionist Party on Paquetá], by Émile Rouède. Here, the ghost of the fireworks over Paquetá Island was the promise, still unfulfilled, of the emancipation of people of African ancestry following the abolition of slavery in Brazil on May 13, 1888.

Cinto brings the unimaginable greatness of the cosmos to the understanding of common people. She converts the public into explorers of the universe, into poetic cosmonauts headed for the ecological awareness of a more responsible humanity.

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“Everything I make becomes landscape. Even the mountain of crumpled papers is a mountain.

So, the relationship with the landscape, with the sky, the ocean and the mountain is always in my work. I think that, for living in a place where there is no landscape, I make my landscapes.�

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EXHIBITION Conception and realization Itaú Cultural Curator Paulo Herkenhoff

Exhibition design Isa Gebara Accessibility design Associação Mais Diferenças ITAÚ CULTURAL President Alfredo Setubal Diretor Eduardo Saron VISUAL ARTS TEAM Manager Sofia Fan Coordinator Juliano Ferreira Executive producer Ângela Oliveira (outsourced) and Rodrigo Linhares AUDIOVISUAL AND LITERATURE TEAM Manager Claudiney Ferreira Coordination of audiovisual content Kety Fernandes Nassar Audiovisual production Roberta Roque Recording and editing Karina Fogaça and Olhar Periférico (outsourced) Audio recording Tomas Cortes Franco (outsourced) Image recording André Seiti and Assum Filmes (outsourced) COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIP TEAM Manager Ana de Fátima Sousa Coordination of content Carlos Costa Production and editing of content Heloísa Iaconis and Milena Buarque Social networks Jullyanna Salles and Renato Corch Proofreading supervision Polyana Lima Proofreading Denise Yumi (outsourced) Graphic design Helga Vaz Translation into English John Norman (outsourced) Visual communication Helga Vaz and Liane Tiemi (outsourced) Editorial production Luciana Araripe

EDUCATION AND RELATIONSHIP TEAM Manager Valéria Toloi Coordination of service and training Samara Ferreira

Educators Amanda Freitas, Caroline Faro, Diego Pinheiro Vieira (trainee), Edinho dos Santos, Edson Bismark, Elissa Sanitá, Joelson Oliveira, Lucas Batista, Matheus Paz, Mayra Reis Rocha, Mônica Abreu Silva, Monique Rocha dos Santos (trainee), Tonne de Andrade, Victor Soriano, Victória de Oliveira, Vinicius Magnun, Vítor Luz and Vitor Narumi ENCYCLOPEDIA TEAM Manager Tânia Rodrigues Coordinator Glaucy Tudda Research Beatriz Pastore Donato (trainee), Elaine Lino and Karine Arruda de Sousa (trainee) INFRASTRUCTURE AND PRODUCTION TEAM Manager Gilberto Labor Coordinator Vinícius Ramos Production Carmen Fajardo, Fabio Marotta, Priscila Tavares, Sofia Gava (trainee) and Wanderley Bispoo

Itaú Cultural, since 2019, is the initiative of a cultural character of the Fundação Itaú para Educação e Cultura.

Sandra Cinto: das ideias na cabeça aos olhos no céu [Sandra Cinto: From Ideas in the Head to Eyes on the Sky]

visitation from Thursday, March 12, through Sunday, May 3, 2020 Tuesday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. [visitors may remain until 8:30 p.m.]

Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. floors 1, –1 and –2 Free admission

This publication was composed in fonts Quiche Flare and Avenir on the 180 g/m2 Clear Clean paper (cover) and 90 g/m2 offset paper (inner pages). Four thousand copies were printed by Margraf, in São Paulo, in the summer of 2020.

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