At the end of the Sixties he returned definitely to Rio de Janeiro, where he still lives and works.

This brief biographical summary is not meaningless. It allows us to draw a first association: the most important moments of Luiz Alphonsus’ artistic and existential formation coincided and had as a background the most important moments of the recent history of both Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.

In 1955, when Luiz Alphonsus’ family moved to Rio de Janeiro, the star of the city illuminated by itself, with its hegemonic brightness, the Brazilian cultural constellation. The nest city of the Neo-concrete movement, of Bossa Nova and of the very project of the new capital, here conceived and from here built (and for this reason based on a unnecessary coastal archetype for the plateau, since its plan in form of sausage was not demanded by a cozy oppression of hills, as it was the case of old Salvador and Rio itself… but by a kind of common urban model for the three capitals Brazil had), the carioca metropolis at least apparently wasn’t risking anything with the changes of which it was the main agent.

The Guimaraens moved to Brasilia in the year after its inauguration in 1960. In this way, along with part of the government, they exchanged the former federal district by the new one, in name of the promise and the dream of a new Brazil. Rio de Janeiro was no longer the capital, but became a powerful city-state, Guanabara. The extinction of this state in 1974 caused Luiz Alphonsus to produce a critical and premonitory drawing… My homage to the ex-state of Guanabara.

Soon following these geo-political changes that were crucial for our future, there was the military coup d’état in 1964, which maximum tension was registered exactly in both Brazilian capitals: the legal one, where the young Luiz Alphonsus lived and, as usual… Guanabara, to where all military troops converged. Five years later, the dictatorship that was able to silence the new Federal District by dissolving the pioneering project of the University of Brasilia, had to face the student rebellions that shock Brazil from Rio de Janeiro.
In the middle of this unstable atmosphere Rio welcomed not only the just returned Luiz Alphonsus, now an adult and promising artist, but also thousand of others, coming from all over the country, seduced by the plurality of the cosmos polis caos. Among these youngsters there were Cildo Meireles, Guilherme Vaz and Alfredo Fontes, whose presence in the city sealed the transference of the Federal District group to Guanabara. Most probably they were the first cultural contribution of the new capital to the former one, that, as before, continued being the epicenter of Brazilian cultural and national lives (Cinema Novo, Theater Opinião 65 and 66, New Objectivity in 1967, Tropicalism…). According to Frederico de Moraes, the Brazilian avant-garde of the epoch was in Rio de Janeiro, not due to rivalry between regions or because a genetic characteristic of its inhabitants, but for gathering the contribution of the best that was being produced in the whole country. For this reason it was formed by several groups, in which the friends from Brasilia where included.

In 1986 the Banerj Art Gallery, under the guidance of the critic Frederico de Moraes, collected, among other, a testimony of Luiz Alphonsus about the generation 1969-70. In it the artist explains the importance of Brasilia in his art and formation:

Brasilia made our minds. There was a cosmic-planetary connection with the city that was being born, in the middle of Brazil, with that largest of all skies. It was impossible no to feel the impact of the city. In the beginning my work was expressionist; Cildo’s also. Even Guilherme, with his music, was expressionist. We were somewhat concerned in discussing art from a scientific viewpoint, but there was that sky over our heads, a metaphysical element. I loved Brasilia. I believe also that the city forced a planetary scale on our work. On the other hand, it was the beginning of the exploration of the cosmic space; men began to escape the frontiers of his planet.

Soon Luiz Alphonsus noticed that Brasilia could be taken as a Cosmo from several points of view: the prophecies about his farm; a great afflux of all kinds of esoteric and mystical people; the never proved landing of flying saucers; the gigantic celestial dome that, like an undefeatable and natural planetarium, involves all corners of that horizontal city, built in an horizontal space; the symbolic Cosmo of a city born from nothing and populated by all, mingled people from all social strata, coming from all regions of the country; the planned urban order, and, finally, the space run itself, born from the Cold War, that aligned the planet’s attention for the rest of the universe and aroused countless speculations and controversies.

Luiz Alphonsus lived intensely the plurality of gateways of this cosmic potency. He allowed being invaded by it, both poetically and emotionally, to the point that, after giving up the idea of becoming an astronomer, transformed it in one of the two essential poles of his work. Still, due to a problem of scale, the Cosmo in which we are included is not inhabitable because of its macro greatness. We can’t even contemplate it in its abstract and invisible totality. Some of his first works done in Rio (Negative-Positive, made in 1970 and A Cut in the Night, made in 1974) carry the explicit mark of this poetic pole.

The Cosmo able to be lived and transformed was materialized thousands of years ago in the great cities, the Cosmos Polis. From the ancestral Babylon to the contemporary London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Pecking; from Alexandria and Roma to the Aztecan capital Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the largest city of Pre-Colombian America and from this to Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, to give only a few examples, all were and are the possible Cosmo… the center of the world for their inhabitants.

If Brasilia, on one hand, became the connection of these several gateways to the Cosmo, on the other hand, especially after the intervention at UnB, it didn’t have, also due to its very few years of existence, any trace of cosmopolitism. It turned cosmic, but not a Cosmo. The best way to enjoy that, in 1960’s Brazil, was to live in Rio de Janeiro. The option made by Luiz Alphonsus, Alfredo Fontes, Cildo Meireles and Guilherme Vaz, the only one of the group who returned to Brasilia.

Like a serpent egg, Rio de Janeiro already showed some signs of its future chronic fatigue: the poetical vagabondage turned into brutal marginality, the former cordiality of the older days into an aggressive trickery, the replacement of the cosmo by the urban chaos, are foreseen in Luiz Alphonsus’ several series, like Homage to cinema.

This suffered and magnificent city found in Luiz Alphonsus its greatest interpreter, the most constant and loyal of all those who here produce since the Seventies. Its essential icons, from the monument-mountains—the Sugar Loaf, Corcovado, Gavea and Two Brothers—mentioned by the geographer Lísia Bernardes, to the popular bars; from the popular Nilton Bravo, painter of the bucolic scenes that decorated the non-tiled walls of Rio de Janeiro’s simple bars, with whom he shared the signature of seven paintings, to the marginality corned in the alleys of the slums; to the women that during the day beautify its beaches and shine at night with their phosphorescent glamour –among them the beautiful Yvonne, with whom the artist married and with whom he still lives, crystallized in the magical Yvonne Copacabana – all the cosmopolitan tenderness of Luiz Alphonsus, his heart (theme of the exhibition “Heart 7/7/77”, held in MAM ), celebrate the urban cosmos in which his life and work indeed flourished.

We can without a doubt affirm that the extensive production of Luiz Alphonsus unfolds and floats between the cosmic, represented by his Brasilia experience, and the Cosmo, the chaos of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Pieces like Modern Bar (Mr. Freedom) and the Triptych # 4 of the series Homage to cinema of the exhibition “Heart 7/7/77”, in MAM Rio, articulate typical situations of the carioca urb, with a galactic background. They are synthesis of the permanent poetical sense of his work.

Evidently, the search of a locus for both the man and the artist that characterizes the poetic nuclei of Luiz Alphonsus’ work—a search associated to the fact of having lived in three of the most important Brazilian cities before turning 20—took him to landscape. His landscapes (whether from the still ongoing series Brazilian landscape or from Central Plateau, as well as the ones from the exhibits “Editions” and “Rio de Janeiro/ Sky lines”, held respectively at the Petite Gallery in 1984 and 1987, and the “Rio de Janeiro landscapes”) are not, as usually they are, open windows for the spectator’s contemplation, but places where Luiz Alphonsus experienced his artist’s passion within the urban scenery of the megalopolis. More than scenes kept in canvases, his “landscapes” indicate itineraries that lead, on one hand, to themselves, but that simultaneously establish connections with the planet and the Universe.

The observer and the passerby reiterates this new perceptive equation. The artist is the one who observes, which does not mean he is still in a fixed point, placed at a constant distance from the object under observation. As an observer, the artist is not condemned to contemplation, but destined to extract all possibilities contained in the situations he observes. The public, on the other hand, a silent contemplator of works done in the past, receives passage and the circulation as a new destiny, which are analogous to the artist’s movements within the Chaos of the Cosmos Polis.

His most recent works, however, display a distance from the iconic-urban thematic that motivated his work throughout the last decades to resume, even if in a quite different mode, the cosmic images from which aroused the initial meanings of his work… now taking a new birth.

Fernando Cocchiarale
Rio de Janeiro, Ausgust 2005