Troubling pollution in recent days has made me think of the relatively Alpine air back in Bom Retiro (btw, it's pronounced Bon, as with all Brazilian m's). Instead of going there we went to an exhibition of Bom Retiro photos in the Jewish Centre.
As you will by now expect whenever I go to a Sao Paulo exhibition, I was less than thrilled: black and white photos only work where there is interesting emotion, character or architectural / natural beauty on which to focus the eye. When there are dull streets and buildings and dull-looking people, you need either an interesting photographer or, failing that, some colour with which to enliven the picture.
Likewise, blurred black and white is even more visually boring. Some of these photos were worse than amateur. A total lack of aesthetic appreciation strikes again. But never fear: there was the de rigeur wall-projected video to distract our attention, showing pedestrians in a Bom Retiro street, or perhaps Luz train station ... in blurry black and white. And somehow managing to be even more boring than the real thing.
The other day I saw some paintings in that popular Brazilian faux-naif style, colourful North-Easterners in a "busy" setting. The problem is that these sort of paintings are not faux-naif, they are simply naif - genuinely unsophisticated and stubbornly unchanging. The visual equivalent of rice and beans. There is no real aesthetic or artistic vision at work here. Gauguin's ghost has nothing to fear.
Anyway, here are a few of the less dreary photos:
I've saved the best till last:
Never underestimate the benefits of any venue if it has a good floor for crawling !
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