Jonathas de Andrade Solo Show

Jonathas de Andrade is occupying the Antonio Room – Galeria Vermelho’s cinema – with the short film O Caseiro [The Caretaker] (2016) which proposes a dialogue with the 1959 film, O Mestre de Apipucos, by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The film is constructed symmetrically in two narratives. At the left, the 1959 film, kindly ceded by the producer, Filmes do Serro, shows the daily life of Gilberto Freyre in his house in the district of Apipucos, in Recife. On the right, Jonathas de Andrade creates a simultaneous mirroring of the scenes of O Mestre de Apipucos, substituting Freyre by a supposed caretaker of the sociologist’s opulent residence. The parallel between the two characters – the historical one of the documentary, and the anonymous one of the fiction – establishes a tension that underlines aspects of class and race, two of the main subjects that Freyre dealt with in his work, as the sociologist appears in the film by Pedro de Andrade living an aristocratic life.

Outside the cinema, Jonathas is showing the installation Suar a Camisa [Sweaty Shirts] (2014), seen for the first time in São Paulo. In direct contact with the workers in the streets of Recife, Andrade negotiated, traded and bought about 120 sweaty shirts from the city’s workers at the end of a workday. The mounting of the shirts in a large line, each on a wooden stand, alludes to a sort of waiting line: an unemployment line, a line to enter a bus, or even a line of striking workers.

The installation Suar a Camisa was shown for the first time at the exhibition Museu de Homem do Nordeste, at MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio), where Jonathas showed the largest set of the series of the same name he has been developing since 2013. The works in the project Museu do Homem do Nordeste are articulated as a collection parallel to that of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, located in the city of Recife (PE). Created in 1979 by Gilberto Freyre, the anthropological museum has a collection of more than 15,000 pieces representative of the region’s ethnic, historical and social formation. In the series by Jonathas de Andrade, the artist experiments with new bases and methodologies for the original museum.