42nd ANNUAL ART EXHIBITION OF FAAP
The exhibition organized annually by the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), since 1964, to present the visual production of its members and program participants, can be seen as one of the most traditional and enduring exhibitions of contemporary art in the city of São Paulo. Thus, the 42nd Annual Art Exhibition of FAAP presents a selection featuring the presence of twenty-two selected students and brings to the visiting public a set of forty-five works that allow for a panoramic view of the experience of contemporary artistic practices developed by the student body of the Foundation, particularly those linked to visual research.
Although the history of the exhibition is known due to its duration and permanence in the city’s art circuit, it is worth noting that the FAAP Art Annual has its beginning associated with the teacher training course in drawing, one of the pioneers in this condition in São Paulo, still in the 1950s; but the exhibition is also very close to the origin of the Brazilian Art Museum of FAAP and, more clearly, to the creation of the School of Fine Arts in the mid-1960s. Over the following decades, particularly in the early 1990s, it developed, expanding to receive, on the other hand, the production of students from courses that became part of the School during that period, such as Industrial Design, Visual Communication, and Architecture. Thus, the exhibition consisted, until the mid-1990s – and, in this condition, also without a defined and explicit selection process – in presenting the set of works resulting from the participation of the student body of the School of Fine Arts.
Since 1999, a new guideline has been implemented, and the exhibition has taken on the form and profile it presents today, namely, a proposal to focus on “inaugurated on December 6, 2010, the exhibition will remain open to the public until February 6, 2011.
specifically for the selection, presentation, and articulation of a set of manifestations in the visual arts field. In this sense, the exhibition also aims to point out what can be seen as the potential and possibilities of visual production. Another fundamental characteristic inherent in the Annual project is its broad participation format, translated in the registration and selection process offered, openly to the entire Institution community, which reaffirms, once again, its project to promote and support activities of a creative, artistic, and cultural nature. The selection of the submitted works, and here we have a peculiarity of the process which is done through the appreciation of the works and not as is more common in processes of this nature, through records and documents (photographs or portfolios), enables the organization of the exhibition that provides a reading of the investigations developed by the students, based on actions initiated in the academic environment. In the fortieth edition, held in 2008, the Art Annual presented a documentary panorama of this trajectory, from its creation in 1964, thus enabling an understanding of its scope of action, as well as revealing its insertion in the city’s art circuit over its five decades of existence. This research exercise on its trajectory was essential to highlight the importance of reflections on the Institution’s own history and its role in the constitution of the artistic environment in which it is inserted.
The Art Annual, even now in its forty-second edition, can still be presented as an activity that privileges innovation and creative potential, integrating the institutional project of the Foundation and, in a coherent manner with its objectives and ideals, acts by encouraging and supporting artistic and cultural production, but also, and mainly, in the sense of valuing the activities of the School of Fine Arts by offering conditions and support for the external visibility of contemporary visual production, which is the object of investigation and professional formation, fundamental to the School. Support implies, thus, recognizing the relevance of the work of its teaching and student body and believing in the role and potential of art as an agent in the process of reflection and transformation in the contemporary world.
The exhibition brings together proposals highlighted by a selection and award committee, always consisting of professionals active in various areas of artistic production and practice, such as artists, researchers, critics, curators, and historians. For this edition, the Committee was composed of Ligia Afonso, Marilá Dardot, Marcos Moraes, and Ricardo Resende who, in selecting the students and their production, articulated a possible understanding of the set of production presented for this process.
Research, as well as the experimental nature, are fundamental elements in what we usually identify as artistic production, and for the selection presented here, they were two of the main criteria used, thus allowing the exhibition to remain faithful to its spirit of giving visibility to proposals for innovation, but also in the pursuit of reflecting the presence of the diversity of proposals, issues, and treatments identifiable in contemporary artistic practices, and the reflections arising from them.
For the Foundation, the main objective in holding the exhibition is to encourage the artistic production of the students, as well as to create a space for reflection based on new ideas and perceptions about art, using education as a tool and interface, expanding this field of experiences beyond ‘academic walls’ and reintroducing it into relation with a broad and diversified segment of the public.
As a parallel program and complementary activity of the exhibition, and aiming to affirm its character as a discussion space, the Annual carries out parallel activities which, in this edition, are materialized by holding, on the first day of the exhibition, a closed meeting of the Selection and Award Committee with the enrolled students – selected or not – for individual conversations, discussing the different aspects of their respective works submitted to the selection process.
Complementing the set of activities, two open meetings will be held for the public and those interested in the last week of the exhibition, the first with the Committee, and the second with Rodolpho Parigi and Bruno Faria, the invited artists. The meetings aim to enhance moments of reflective exchange on these experiments and contemporary artistic practices perceptible in the students’ training process and visible in the exhibition organized based on the selection that constitutes this edition of the FAAP Art Annual.
FAAP is a hub for research and dissemination of young artists’ production, allowing the experience and experimentation of the arts with seriousness and according to the demands of the artistic system. Thinking of the experience with art as a way to enhance dialogue and approach between artists and participants, then the Annual’s space further amplifies this perspective by bringing it into the institutional space of education. Since the first edition in 1964, the exhibition has been revealing artists and innovating the concept of contemporary art and creativity over its four decades of existence. Entering its forty-second edition now, the FAAP Art Annual; as an exhibition of visual arts by the Foundation’s students, invites us to look at and reflect on the contemporary artistic production represented here, to try to see, in it, the restlessness present in the production of young artists in their formative process.
Marcos Moraes Coordinator of the Fine Arts / Cultural Production Course FAAP Art Residency Programs
