“ENbox”

Since the 1980s, the paintings of Emmanuel Nassar, from Pará, have become emblematic in Brazilian and international contemporary art. The artist has exhibited at the 20th and 24th São Paulo Biennials, won the grand prize at the 6th Cuenca Biennial, and participated in the 45th Venice Biennial. His work is in the collections of the University Essex Museum (England), the Cisneros Foundation – Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (New York/Caracas), Marcantonio Vilaça, MAM - Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói and São Paulo, and the State Museum of Pará, among others.

Since the beginning of his career, Emmanuel Nassar has worked with elements specific to Brazilian popular tradition and incorporated them into his work, exploring them in a way that few of his contemporaries have. Although his generation was influenced by Pop and Constructivist art, the artist works with these languages ​​in a very particular way. When he produced the work Recepcôr in 1981, Nassar began to insert elements such as gears, mechanisms and common objects into his canvases, with the same tone that we see in market stalls or popular housing. In this way, he created his own vocabulary that goes beyond the limits of both popular imagery and the Constructivist vector.

In Bandeiras, a work from 1998, the artist fills the walls of the exhibition space with 143 flags from cities in Pará. With the work Incêndio, he won the prize at the 6th Cuenca Biennial. In the words of Tadeu Chiarelli: “aware of the supposed trivialization and exhaustion of erudite visual languages, Nassar realized that such popular elements had similarities that were, at the very least, destabilizing to the concepts that governed (and still govern) one of the greatest traditions of 20th century art in Brazil and abroad: constructivism. (...) Thus, he ends up zeroing out the two languages, and his work survives as a powerful and colorful short-circuit in the gears that connect – and disintegrate – the two traditions.”