A FOTOGRAFIA COMO REFERÊNCIA EM PROCESSOS CRIATIVOS DA PINTURA BRASILEIRA NO SÉCULO XXI: possibilidades e convergências

Abstract

When we think about the painting produced from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it is possible to observe, through historical records, that photographs are, since their invention, constantly taken by painters from different parts of the world and from the most different areas as a reference for their works. creations; this has been the subject of records in the field of art history and theoretical and critical studies whose focus is the range of relationships between painting and photography, and it is in this context that the present thesis is inserted, by looking at part of this production, from the field of language studies. Bringing the issue to Brazilian contemporary art produced in the first decades of the 21st century, this research surveyed and analyzed the different paths taken by fifteen artists in the use of photographs as a reference for the production of fifteen recent Brazilian paintings, a set of works chosen from of criteria that attest to their relevance and representativeness in the national artistic scene, so that they started to be taken as initial documents for the search for other documents about their creative processes, thus composing the corpus for our analyses. The methodological treatment of the documents was guided by the hypothesis that it is possible to detect, from the comparative analysis of documents of creative processes of a representative set of works of painting produced in Brazil in the last two decades, both a range of possibilities in the approaches adopted by artists who make use of photographs in their creative processes, as well as certain convergences, which allowed identifying, delimiting and grouping aspects of this practice in relation to the spatial and temporal cut we are dealing with. In our path, we turned our attention to the artistic thought itself in process through precepts of genetic criticism, with a theoretical-methodological approach that was based on aspects of semiotics and other branches of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy, seeking in the relationship between the works delivered to the public and the records about their processes, a space for reflections on the proposed issue. Finally, we present our conclusions about how the relationships between the photographic references and the fifteen paintings that make up the corpus of this research are constituted; then, understanding that the concreteness of such conclusions is limited to what was observed in this material, but considering that the consistency of these analyzes allows drawing a map and projecting it to a broader scenario – that of Brazilian pictorial production in the 21st century – , we present (preserving a hypothetical character and subject to future verification) the generalizations found from three aspects: the origin of the referential photographs, their role in the making of painting and the nature of referentiality. We intend that this research be a contribution to the educational field and to the artistic field – a relevant material not only for theorists of the visual arts, who are interested in the creative processes in painting, but also for teachers, academics and even already active artists who can take advantage of our studies on photography as a reference in painting.