From the inaugural edition of the São Paulo Biennial, in 1951, to the fourteenth Biennial, in 1977, the event awarded prizes to the best works. I’ve been going to the benchmark exhibition since 1981, when I was first astonished by greats such as Tunga, Cildo Meireles and Gilbert & George. The current show, its thirty-sixth edition, is one of my least preferred. Pity. However, the set of five grand nude expressionistic paintings on the second floor by Márcia Falcão explodes with energy from the canvas. The forty-year-old artist bravely portrays her fleshy, dark-skinned self in unflattering positions and grotesque contortions. They made my heart pound.
An admirable sense of intimacy, solitude, despair and overwhelming power prevails in its unity subdued by a narrow color scheme of browns bursting from the expansive, energetic gestural brushwork of this contemporary Venus of Willendorf from the violent outskirts of Rio who boldly exposes her full physique.
I never liked Botero’s rotund figures that chic Parisians paid thousands for; on the other hand, I love Titian’s fleshy women and, of course, Jenny Saville, who once said: “I’m not painting disgusting, big women. I’m painting women who’ve been made to think they’re big and disgusting.” Like Saville, Falcão’s spectacular canvases are very serious work. Her paintings of volcanic attitude express a powerful confrontational stance, igniting tension, disturbance and unease. Not only do they scream boldness, but they also attack rigid beauty standards to unshackle deep-rooted sexism, racism and sizeism haunting our hypocritical society. If she continues surfing this wave, blending body and boldness, Falcão has everything to top the pantheon as one of the rising stars of her generation.
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