Around midnight on December 22, 1938, the Afro-Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909-1989) was, he says, visited by seven angels who sent him on a mission. A few days later, he appeared at the door of the São Bento Monastery in Rio de Janeiro, introducing himself as Jesus. In January 1939, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia; he would then spend time in numerous mental institutions, including the Colônia Juliano Moreira de Rio, a notoriously brutal hospital where, from 1964, he lived out the rest of his life. Voices in his head were telling him to remake and organize the things of the world in preparation for the Day of Judgment, when he would come face to face with God. This choir never calmed down and kept him up at night, urging him relentlessly to create what would, after decades of confinement, total more than a thousand works of art which, in his words, “represent the existence of the earth”.
This exhibition, the first in the United States devoted solely to Bispo’s unusual practice, presents a poignant selection of his clothes (roupas), banners (standards), files (files), and what is called its objects dressed for fios azuis (objects covered in blue thread), for which he unravels the uniforms worn by the inhabitants of the colony to recreate everyday objects such as a paint roller, a bow, a shoehorn and a compass. Oscillating between the real and the imaginary, these objects, which are all undated, possess a ghostly and ephemeral aura, almost as if they were fleeing – or not for long for this world, although they are largely its products. . All of Bispo’s supplies were found or traded: he nailed bottles, buttons, combs, cutlery, flip flops and mugs to wooden panels, displaying them in various configurations – exalting them – as collections . He painstakingly embroidered linens to create his banners, rich catalogs of varied subjects ranging from the intimate to the political and the historical. (He read the newspaper, which kept him informed of world events.) On one side of Untitled (Eu preciso dessas palavras escritas) (Untitled [I Need These Words Written]), he delicately rendered a male figure flanked by avalanches of words; on the other side he sewed a map of Brazil and its many states. Another banner, Untitled (Dicionário de nomes letra A) (Untitled [Dictionary of Names Letter A]), offers a dense list of people whose names begin with this letter as well as their professions. For Bispo, language represented the existence of the Earth as effectively as any object or image, and for the viewer this equivalence can recast his practice into something like a visual incantation.
It should be noted that Bispo refused to call his productions art, perhaps deeming it a category too frivolous for his divine purpose. For him, getting attention – being seen – was necessary to be saved. He sewed a cape, scarf, bolero and crown of red and black beads after Exu, a powerful spirit of the Afro-Brazilian religions of Quimbanda and Umbanda. He also sewed himself Untitled (Manto da apresentação) (Untitled [Annunciation Garment]), a beautiful royal cloak he planned to wear on the day he was finally presented to God. He embroidered it with an assortment of images: a phonograph, a stool, a cart, train tracks, a seesaw, letters, numbers and a heart. Inside the room he stitched the names of hundreds of women he wanted to take with him to heaven. It is assumed that he wished to live in paradise surrounded by as much beauty as he had created here on Earth.
