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Sérgio B. Martins is Associate Professor of Art History in the History Department at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and author of Borderless Painting as Borderless Art and Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979.

The artwork of Antonio Dias (1944–2018) uniquely captures the interwoven histories of Brazilian postwar realism and of European conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s. By tracking Dias’s ever-shifting works and circulation as he moved from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and then to Milan, Borderless Painting as Borderless Art provides the first in-depth study of the artist.

Sérgio B. Martins uses Dias’s trajectory as a lens to explore different approaches to avant-gardism and its crisis in Brazil, France, and northern Italy, weaving in the perspectives of figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany, Giulio Paolini, and Tommaso Trini, as well as the Fluxus movement. The book ultimately argues that Dias pitted his formation in a semi-peripheral avant-garde against a post–avant-gardist milieu where commodity culture and market relations were far more pervasive and determinant vis-à-vis the arts scene.

Borderless Painting as Borderless Art is part of the Studies on Latin American Art and Latinx Art series.

What initially drew you to Dias as a subject, and what does Dias’s trajectory reveal about the different approaches to avant-gardism?

I was first attracted to Dias as part of my broader study of the coordinates of Brazilian postwar avant-gardism. At that point, I was mostly concerned with understanding how the Brazilian avant-garde appropriated European modernism in a particularly forceful way – with how it hijacked modernism, so to speak. There was already a transnational thrust to this argument, insofar as it entailed a revision of modernism from a peripheral perspective. But Dias's role in my argument at that point was largely determined by the broader logic I was trying to describe, of which artists like his friend Hélio Oiticica were more representative.

Later, I came to realize that Dias's move to Europe – first to Paris, in 1967, and the year after to Milan, where he settled – differed significantly from the exile or self-exile of other important Brazilian artists of that period, and that this difference pertained to the very historicity of avant-gardism and its crisis. For instance: whereas Oiticica mostly turned his back on the New York artworld when he lived there in the 1970s, Dias quickly found his footing in European artistic circles: he was already acquainted with Pierre Restany and, in Paris, he befriended Corneille and was introduced to the likes of Marcello Rumma and Harald Szeemann, who included him in his Science Fiction show. In Milan, one of the most vibrant artistic centers in continental Europe at the time, Dias sought to further and expand these ties, circulating with Fluxus agitators, dialoguing with artists associated with Arte Povera and Pittura Analitica, and quickly signing with a major local gallery, namely Studio Marconi.

This was an entirely novel situation. The art market in Brazil at that time was a homemade affair spearheaded by militant marchands like Jean Boghici and Franco Terranova, whose business did not disturb in any significant way the logic of avant-gardism. What I find impressive in Dias is how quickly after landing in Milan he realized that the market was becoming an inescapable mediator of artistic circulation, and how thoroughly he recalibrated his practice in order to address such an utterly different scenario. This is not to say that he simply capitulated to an art market that practically did not exist in Brazil. My wager is that he was able to put himself in a very peculiar position whereby he accepted that avant-gardism as he knew it was over while simultaneously taking advantage of his earlier, avant-gardist lessons in order to negotiate with the new regime of artistic production and circulation he encountered in Europe. In a nutshell, my book retraces the complex formation of this stance, which is to say, of Dias's passage to a kind of critical post-avant-gardism.

How did encounters with figures and movements such as Oiticica, Fluxus, and European conceptualists influence Dias’s practice, and what does this tell us about artistic exchange between Brazil and Europe in the 1960s and ’70s? Does Dias’s transcontinental movement reshape our understanding of “borderless” art?

It is crucial to bear in mind that Dias relocated to Europe precisely when his graphically visceral hybrids of painting and three-dimensional objects were being heralded by Oiticica as the crux of a collective avant-gardist wager on the overcoming of painting and sculpture in favor of participatory propositions that sought to resist political and cultural conservatism. This is what Oiticica termed "environmental art", and Dias still tried to engage with it while in Paris by producing objects and making plans for environmental works, but things quickly changed in Milan. On the one hand, his participation in Fluxus-like happenings exposed him to a different kind of environmental art, more markedly urban and preoccupied with mass production and commodity fetishism. On the other, Conceptualism was on the rise, and he also flirted with it, for example, by submitting his plans for environments to be exhibited as just that – plans, and not built environments – in another exhibition Szeemann was preparing.

What is interesting is that he ultimately steered away from all of these possibilities and opted to reengage instead with painting. But this was very different from the kind of painting he was best known for in Brazil: all the graphic renderings of sex and violence gave way to monochromatic patterns of drips and grids with deadpan, enigmatic titles in English – many of which were actually appropriated fragments from the anodyne, everyday speech of advertising. In a way, what he was doing was to update his early, avant-gardist rejection of Pop commercialism – which those charged images and abject appendages from his mid-1960s paintings sought to counter – and turn it against the broader and diffuse visuality of design that was gradually but surely becoming the gist of a wholly commodified visual culture. And he felt, for example, that the philosophical rejection of the sensible by visual Conceptual artists like Kosuth not only failed to address this critical aspect of contemporary culture against which all art circulated, but was ultimately complicit with it. So it was also a critique of Conceptualism informed by his early experience in a semiperipheral avant-garde, but now transcoded into a visual language that was apt to circulate in the contemporary art market.

When Dias writes, in English, the fragment I use as my book's title, he is thus being ironic. Titles such as "Anywhere is my land" are not meant as celebrations of a borderless, globalized art; they are meant, on the contrary, as a dialectical thrust at this supposed borderlessness. His major achievement at this point is to produce paintings upon which this ironic take on English as the universal language converges with a methodic emptying out of visuality. He calls these paintings, at one point, "negative art for a negative country", which was also a way of saying that this is how his experience as an artist coming from a politically turbulent country on the fringes of modernity could be turned into a unique, critical perspective vis-à-vis modernism in general. But, then again, he is only able to take artistic advantage of this dialectical understanding of his own experience because his circulation in Northern Italy allowed him to realize, in a way none of his Brazilian peers had done, that modernism and the avant-garde were history.

What lessons do you hope readers will take away from the book?

While this is a book on a Brazilian artist, and thus technically a work of Latin American art history, I believe that its transnational stance works against the grain of these fields, and also of the mold of the conventional art history monograph. There is nothing new, of course, in advancing a transnational critique of modernism from its fringes, but I think Dias's work brings an unexpected twist to this kind of argument as it short-circuits two different temporalities that coexisted along the uneven geography of late capitalism. In order to make its argument cogent, this book also had to become a book about postwar Italian art and European conceptualism more generally – or, indeed, an unorthodox rereading of these movements and contexts from Dias's unexpected viewpoint. I thus think it will appeal to readers interested in what the crisis of modernism and the avant-gardes can tell us about the spatial and temporal complexities of late capitalism more generally.