<p>The Brazilian sculptor consumes Modernist masters to better regurgitate them, writes Evan Moffitt</p>

Evan Moffitt

Erika Verzutti’s insatiable appetite for art history 

<p>Nothing in the world is hungrier than a desiring gaze. At least that’s a precept of second-wave feminist art theory, which proposed that looking at art should be understood as a form of consumption. According to this view, the female nudes in baroque and Renaissance paintings are succulent&nbsp;meals cooked up by male artists for other, richer men to devour. There’s much truth to this version of history, though it tends to ignore that women have appetites, too. And&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7285/Erika-Verzutti">Erika Verzutti</a> is a very hungry artist. An omnivorous lover of art history, she metabolizes its many styles and references in her sculptures made of bronze, concrete, plaster, and papier-mâché.Verzutti makes the heaviest of these materials seem airy and weightless, in much the same way that she injects buoyant humor into her classical discipline. For her, the canon is both food and fertilizer: Her cast fruit and vegetables, arranged to resemble historical artworks, simultaneously muck up male-dominated narratives and revere the masters by imitating them.</p>

<p>Take, for instance, <em>Cocoa Tower </em>(2014), a slender totem of cacao pods that have been stacked, cast in bronze, and splattered with pink, white, and green paint. The work resembles&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8477/Constantin-Brancusi">Constantin Brâncuși</a>’s monumental <em>Endless Column</em> (1938), which rises over the Romanian city&nbsp;of Târgu&nbsp;Jiu. One could imagine Verzutti’s version at a larger scale, towering above the canopy of the Brazilian Amazon. Its seemingly edible arrangement, meanwhile, reflects the principle of anthropophagy, or cultural cannibalism, first theorized by Oswald de Andrade in his <em>Anthropophagic Manifesto </em>(1928). An essential Modernist text, the manifesto argues that, like the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon known to practice ritual cannibalism, Brazilian artists should consume as many cultural influences as they can in order to produce their work. De Andrade believed Brazil itself was a singular stew (or feijoada, perhaps) of those cultural influences, and that only the most voracious of appetites could channel this diversity into a new and uniquely Brazilian art. Verzutti takes up his charge with deadpan literalism, transforming the tropical fruit and vegetables of Brazilian markets into the forms that have shaped the country’s artistic and popular imagination. As the curator André Mesquita observed in <em>The Indiscipline of Sculpture</em>, the catalog for the artist’s eponymous 2021 survey at the Museu de arte&nbsp;de São Paulo, ‘Verzutti’s vital creation plays an anthropophagic role by devouring the canonized, undoing its code, and regurgitating it as something of a different nature.’</p>

<p>I first met Verzutti in 2018 over martinis and french&nbsp;fries at The Odeon, a popular bistro in downtown New York, where she had come for her exhibition ‘Ex Gurus’ at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1179/Andrew-Kreps-Gallery">Andrew Kreps Gallery</a>. She carried herself with a dry, morose sense of humor that befitted the witticism of her work. Talk grew somber when it turned to the political situation in Brazil and the United States, and Verzutti’s sense that the surprise election of Jair Bolsonaro was reflective of a more endemic illiberalism in her country. Electoral politics are absent from her playfully abstract sculptures, although they poke holes in the inflated egotism of patriarchal tropes that characterize autocrats like Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and their predecessors. Her 2014 work <em>Cocar </em>(<em>Cockade</em>), for example, fashioned from bronze-cast bananas and paintbrushes,&nbsp;absurdly enlarges the type of&nbsp;rosette worn by colonial military officers. <em>Batalha</em> (<em>Battle</em>, 2010), meanwhile, piles 90&nbsp;cast concrete watermelons like misshapen, impotent cannonballs.</p>

<p>We were joined by the writer and curator Fernanda Brenner, who organized Verzutti’s first solo institutional exhibition at Pivô, a São Paulo kunsthalle, in 2016. There, her&nbsp;hand-molded enormous plaster swans seemed to float through the sinuous galleries, unencumbered by the concrete architecture. <em>Nessie</em> (2008), a phallic form in clay, resembled the spectral head in alleged photos of the Loch Ness Monster. It also recalled Verzutti’s many ‘Tarsilas’ (2004–18), sculptures of varying sizes and mediums that honor the Brazilian Modernist painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/29439/Tarsila-do-Amaral">Tarsila do Amaral</a>. Inspired by a phallic green tendril in do Amaral’s 1929 painting <em>Sol Poente</em> <em>(Setting Sun) </em>– a work that inspired&nbsp;<em>The Anthropophagic Manifesto</em> – Verzutti’s&nbsp;‘Tarsilas’ are a legion of little monsters come to nibble at art history’s moldering foundations. In <em>Tarsila com Novo</em> (<em>Tarsila with New</em>, 2011), the creature duels with a cast bronze zucchini. For <em>Tarsila&nbsp;com&nbsp;Koons</em> (2015), Verzutti placed a single cast grapefruit, painted iridescent blue, at the base of the flaccid column. Resembling one of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-jeff-koons">Jeff Koons</a>’ ‘Gazing Balls’, it’s a profoundly emasculating reference to the superstar male artist.</p>

<p>‘When appropriating works from other artists, Verzutti is not questioning authorship or its value, rather she puts them in motion, and sometimes in check,’ Brenner later wrote in <em>The Indiscipline of Sculpture</em>. ‘She “profanes” [the work] while continuing to celebrate its origins.’&nbsp;As every good comic knows, it’s a great honor to get roasted; Verzutti skewers and cooks her idols until they’re well done. For her 2019&nbsp;exhibition ‘Carne Sintética’&nbsp;(Synthetic Meat) at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1125/Fortes-D-Aloia-Gabriel">Fortes D’Aloia &amp; Gabriel</a> in São Paulo, she presented a series of small, wall-mounted sculptures that, once again, referenced Modernist masterpieces through the form of basic foodstuffs. A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9186/Piero-Manzoni">Piero Manzoni</a> ‘Achrome’ appeared as a scattering of cookies on a napkin (<em>Achrome com Biscoito</em>, 2019). And one of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/16972/Lygia-Pape">Lygia Pape</a>’s ‘Amazoninos’, sculptures inspired by aerial views of the Amazon, was rendered as a constellation of marshmallows on a black ground, as if to emphasize the absurd and artificial nature of urbanized Brazil.</p>

<p>Verzutti also evoked the urbanization and ecological destruction of Brazil’s natural landscape with ‘Brasilia’ (2010–19), her series of spiny jackfruit cast in bronze and incised with sharp, angular cuts painted white. The works’ shared title refers to the country’s capital, a city master-planned by the architect Oscar Niemeyer and carved from the dry outer regions of the Amazon in the late 1950s. With their wild, uneven rinds and smooth, perfect interiors, the sculptures embody both the beauty and violence of Modernism. </p><p>Spiky&nbsp;jackfruit are&nbsp;one of Verzutti’s&nbsp;favorite forms. Her ‘Venuses’ (2013–ongoing) stack enormous slices of the fruit, cast in concrete or bronze, with casts of pumpkin and soursop slices. Their rotund shapes recall the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic fertility fetish. At such a powerful scale and material density, their voluptuous, organic bases disarm misogynistic stereotypes about women from the tropics. These Venuses are proudly erotic, unashamed of their hunger. Once again, Verzutti’s sly references celebrate the power of the creative appetite. If history can be consumed, she suggests, then we ought to be playing with our food.</p>

<p>Erika Verzutti is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1179/Andrew-Kreps-Gallery">Andrew Kreps Gallery</a>,&nbsp;New York City;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1162/Alison-Jacques">Alison Jacques</a>, London;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1125/Fortes-D-Aloia-Gabriel">Fortes D’Aloia &amp; Gabriel</a>,&nbsp;São Paulo and&nbsp;Rio de Janeiro;&nbsp;and Misako &amp; Rosen,&nbsp;Tokyo.</p><p>Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor, and critic based in New York City.</p>

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<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Cultured Meat</em> (detail), 2019. 2. Installation view of Erika Verzutti's exhibition 'The Indiscipline of Sculpture', MASP, São Paulo, 2021. Photo by Isabella Matheus. 3a (desktop view): Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Mineral</em>, 2019. 3b (mobile view): Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Dinosaurs with Helmet</em>, 2017. Courtesy of the artist; Fortes D’Aloia &amp; Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Alison Jacques, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York City; and Misako &amp; Rosen, Tokyo.</p>

The Brazilian sculptor consumes Modernist masters to better regurgitate them, writes Evan Moffitt 

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The Brazilian sculptor consumes Modernist masters to better regurgitate them, writes Evan Moffitt

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