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  • An Interview with Alessandro Cesar
  • Charles H. Rowell

This interview was conducted at the home of the artist in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, December 23, 1995. Mauricio Virgens served as our interpreter during the taping. Agostino R. Strina translated the following text from Portuguese to English.

CHARLES H. ROWELL:

Before you went to Germany, you were living here in Bahia. Why did you go to Germany?

ALESSANDRO CESAR:

Traveling abroad was already on my mind before I went to Germany, but I had not decided specifically where I would travel. Actually my travel to Germany occurred by chance; I had not planned to travel there. A German friend of mine expressed an interest in showing my work in Germany. Later I got in touch with the German-Brazilian Association in Germany (whose function is the diffusion of the Brazilian culture in Germany). It was this association, along with the Brazilian Embassy in Bonn, that organized most of the exhibitions of my work in Germany.

ROWELL:

You spent two years working on your art in Germany. You recently returned here to your native Brazil. For you as artist, what is or was the meaning of your two-year stay in Germany?

CESAR:

During those two years, I literally lived only with my art. They were extraordinarily rich and very important years; they allowed me a chance to make a sort of self-analysis of my painting. Living a great distance from my original and familiar frame of reference, from my habitual living space, from my friends and family, I was allowed, during those two years, another perception of my work. I could also make a more critical analysis of the relations between the people and my work; I could penetrate deeper into the way the public looks at my paintings and at which levels the communication is produced. In Germany I had the opportunity of showing my work to a public that is very different from that in Brazil, specifically that here in Bahia. I am talking about a group of people who have a different culture, a different mentality, a different perspective of life. And I had a great curiosity about the people’s reactions to (some of them were surprises) and comments about my paintings.

ROWELL:

During your stay in Germany, did you discover anything about yourself as an artist? In other words, did those two years make a difference for you as an artist? [End Page 719]

CESAR:

I think traveling abroad is always beneficial for the artist. When I was in Germany, for example, I had access to new reference systems, to artists whose culture is different from my own, and to different art products. All of these caused me to reflect on issues and ideas and feelings I was not aware of in Brazil. But my stay in Germany did not change the essence of my soul, of me as a person, of me as an artist. Nor did it change the sources of my inspiration; those sources, of course, are still my roots, so to speak.

ROWELL:

Did your stay in Germany influence your idea of the artist? For you now, what is an artist? Does the artist have a social or political function? Or does the artist first communicate with himself/herself and then to others?

CESAR:

My stay in Germany had other consequences for me. For example, I dropped some of my values, I replaced others, and these changes affected my social and political positions, producing for me a new vision of things. In today’s world, where everything happens with a great speed, the access to information is practically instantaneous. Art relates and records the moments through which humanity passes. The artist is inserted in that context. The artist is, then, engaged in the social and political time in which he lives, and engagement is reflected in the art he/she produces.

ROWELL:

I asked about social and political functions of art after noticing the title of one of your paintings, “The Renunciation of Satisfaction,” a very powerful phrase which has both political and social implications for me when I relate the words to the painting itself.

CESAR:

It is very difficult...

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