The gallery was packed and so were the matchesÖ provisionally. I don’t remember if it was the exasperating noise of so many shoes scratching the sandpaper floor, echoing the sound of matches being lit that came from the loudspeakers, or a general feeling of incompleteness given by the pointless contemplation of that mount without the roaring thunders that usually accompany the scene of the Sermon in films, or the irresistible urge to violate and to blind that untouchable, impassive cube, with eyes that would not blink nor shed a tear, just like a god. That temple had to fall and be conquered, and the matches used. Everyone wanted to light a candle for God and still another for the Devil.


In panic, the director of the gallery appealed to those actors, who no longer knew how to act, to act - this time for real - as security guards. ‘Don’t you dare touch those matches’, and they didn’t mean that work of art; and they shouted, and they pushed, and they huffed and they puffed, and they acted, and the gallery became hell. The police was called, the gallery was evacuated and closed. The event did not last 24 hours as planned. But: what exactly had been planned? I never really knew. But two things I know: that sure was an opening, and that sure was an ‘explosion’.


Artur Barrio

It was not only in prisons that people died of inexplicable causes in Brazil in the 60s. In Rio de Janeiro, the bodies of homeless people were being appearing floating in the waters of the remote Guand? River, in numbers and often enough to suggest they were being killed by the police and left there to rot in peace. This operation is known in Brazil by the suggestive name of desova, literally ‘laying of eggs’.


The banks of rivers were among other places where, in 1970, and first in Belo Horizonte, Artur Barrio exposed his Trouxas: bundles wrapped in cloth stained with red paint which the people who came in flocks to watch, and soon the police and the firemen who came to intervene, would immediately and for obvious reasons take for human bloody carcasses left there to rot.


The word trouxas deserves further attention. Trouxa means bundle, pack, parcel. In a more sweetened view, Barrio’s work refers, perhaps pays homage, to the bundle of clothes a woman brings to the banks of a river for washing. Another meaning for trouxa is fool or sucker. Fazer alguém de trouxa - literally, ‘to make a bundle of someone’ - means ‘to fool someone’. Unlike the painters in Pliny’s legendary narratives about the quest for maximum realism, and about the ability of painting to fool the senses - such as painted grapes that birds would eagerly come to peck, or paintings representing wrapped paintings that one would take for wrapped paintings - Artur Barrio was not at all claiming some prize for maximum realism. This prize obviously goes to the police. Fazendo alguém de trouxa by making a bundle of everyone with his carcasses apparently wrapped in blood, Barrio was just doing the washing. Or perhaps laying some eggs.