Renata Lucas, Kunst-werke (cabeça e cauda de cavalo) (Artworks [Head and Tail of a Horse]), 2010/2024, grass, soil, movable floor platform, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2025, installation view
2025. Fabio Cypriano
At the end of September, witnessing musician Gilberto Gil—at eighty-three—climbing onto a sound truck in Rio de Janeiro to sing and protest in defense of Brazilian democracy alongside other towering figures in Brazilian music, such as Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque, brought tears to my eyes. At the same time, it was heart-wrenching to realize that within a single lifetime, we must once again confront authoritarian political regimes so directly, just as these three artists did during the historic Passeata dos Cem Mil (March of the Hundred Thousand) against the military dictatorship in the same city in 1968. The parallels with the United States today are glaring.
Fabio Cypriano opens his concise yet potent essay on Renata Lucas’s exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, “Domingo no Parque” (Sunday in the Park), by referring to Gil’s song of that name. Cypriano remains one of the last defenders of steadfast art criticism in Brazil. Yes, at times he veers toward extreme judgments, but there is no hedging, no fence-sitting. In this text, he aligns the precarity of app-based delivery labor with the exhaustive repetitions that structure Lucas’s works—an accumulation of repetitions that reflect the opportunistic redundancy in contemporary museum programming. Lucas’s interventions—repositioning the sidewalk pavement at a strange angle, for instance—are framed as surreal counter-directives, negotiating with the very bureaucratic frameworks that sustain institutional order. Cypriano advocates for the surreal as a compelling way of making an epistemological argument in art criticism at a time of post-truth politics, rather than merely trying to reimpose the rigidity of rationality. When information has been corrupted to the point where historical protests have to be relived, he suggests, we should question what is true or false and explore the shadings of this supposed dichotomy
Text originally published at Artforum, Vol. 64, N. 4, December 2025
Fabio Cypriano opens his concise yet potent essay on Renata Lucas’s exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, “Domingo no Parque” (Sunday in the Park), by referring to Gil’s song of that name. Cypriano remains one of the last defenders of steadfast art criticism in Brazil. Yes, at times he veers toward extreme judgments, but there is no hedging, no fence-sitting. In this text, he aligns the precarity of app-based delivery labor with the exhaustive repetitions that structure Lucas’s works—an accumulation of repetitions that reflect the opportunistic redundancy in contemporary museum programming. Lucas’s interventions—repositioning the sidewalk pavement at a strange angle, for instance—are framed as surreal counter-directives, negotiating with the very bureaucratic frameworks that sustain institutional order. Cypriano advocates for the surreal as a compelling way of making an epistemological argument in art criticism at a time of post-truth politics, rather than merely trying to reimpose the rigidity of rationality. When information has been corrupted to the point where historical protests have to be relived, he suggests, we should question what is true or false and explore the shadings of this supposed dichotomy
Text originally published at Artforum, Vol. 64, N. 4, December 2025