Borderless Painting as Borderless Art: Antonio Dias between Brazil and Europe

The bulk of Martins’s book explores the significance of this hinge point in Dias’s trajectory, which was shaped by the necessity of making connections with dealers and galleries within an emergent contemporary art market. Alive to the irony of the situation, Dias negotiated these demands by playfully adopting the mythology of cosmopolitan artistry, fully aware that “both his life and the reception of his work would always be determined, to a considerable extent, by his South American origin.” In Anywhere Is My Land (1968), one of his best-known pieces from the period, a white grid partitions a galaxy of stars like locations on a terrestrial map, putting outer space in the crosshairs. The English-language caption evokes the empty clichés of gambling and aviation (“the sky’s the limit!”), while also thematically introducing the ideology of free movement. As Martins demonstrates, Dias actively sought out indeterminate spaces like these, trading on the instability of the binary oppositions through which he was received: universal and particular, national and global, core and periphery. If his art embraced positive universality, it was in order to expose it as a form of exclusion, as becomes clear from another line in his notebooks, almost a manifesto: “NEGATIVE ART FOR A NEGATIVE COUNTRY.”

In his previous book, Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979, Martins argued that Brazil’s postwar avant-garde hijacked the strategies of modernism in a way that troubles dominant Euro-American narratives about how art history develops. Borderless Painting as Borderless Art traces the same contrapuntal movement along a different latitude, revealing how Dias’s adoption of conceptual techniques in Europe negatively indexed his peripheral formation as an artist. While the most up-to-date works of the era were laying claim to a generic concept of art that superseded the narrowness of national borders, Dias’s own works seemed unable to shrug off the contingency of geographical origin, throwing into relief the asymmetrical structure of the world art market. The problem, as Martins puts it, was that “Brazil could not be figured without his painting registering as provincial, or worse, exotic.” The artist’s solution was to enroll himself as the citizen of a negative country, one that manifested through his engagement with a range of art-critical categories, which he dialogued with but never totally adhered to. Although limited to the career of a Brazilian artist, Martins’s book succeeds in disclosing a more general system of marginal inclusion that still determines the circulation of artworks today.