FRANS KRAJCBERG
Brazil's Eco Sculptor

By Leon Kaplan

Reproduced from ARTFOCUS/67, Fall 1999 ©ARTFOCUS MAGAZINE

Although the writer of the Negro River Naturalist Manifesto was already working on his monumental sculptures in l970, Brazilian eco-sculptor Frans Krajcberg. did not catch international attention until 1992, when he displayed his art at the MAM (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio de Janeiro, simultaneously with The Earth Summit. Recently, La Villette showcased a retrospective of his work with 350 sculptures. But his is not a case of sudden fame: Krajcberg's sculptures can be found in museums and collections all over the world. A protegée of the likes of Chagall and Braque, he has won several Biennal awards in the last three decades.

My affair with his legacy started even before I saw filmaker Walter Salles'(Central Station) documentary about him. What most impresses me in Krajcberg's work is the transparency of his intentions, the consistency of his discourse. He re-arranges pieces of Brazilian native trees fallen in accidents, such as fire provoked by men.
Although he is currently very big in Brazil and Europe (Krajcberg's pieces sell from $10,000 to $200,000 US), he is as hated as he is loved: some pieces showcased in l998 in Paris still await clearance in a container in Santos City port customs, one year after arrivinback in Brazil. Government authorities keep slapping him on the wrist for bringing international eyes to the Brazilian deforestation problem.

But Krajcberg’s career as a sculptor or environmentalist didn't start in Brazil. Born in Kozienice, Poland in l921, Krajcberg moved to Russia after losing his family in the Holocaust. Before moving to Brazil in l948, he witnessed the great modern art movements in Europe, living in France.
Since 1975 he has shared his time between France and Brazil. He set up a studio in Paris and another in Nova Vicosa (north of Brazil), where he is dazzled by the colours and forms of the region's vegetation. Set high in a tree, secluded in the forest, this studio/residence is a perfect expression of his esthetics.

In Krajcberg's own words: "I was born in this world called nature and I felt its greatest impact in Brazil. Here I feel I was born for a second time; here I became conscious of being a man and of participating in life with my sensibility, my work, my thoughts... except for the Indians, here we all come from abroad and relate to the wild forests, rich, full of movement, vibrating with colours, growing freely.

Here I do not feel stifled by the cultivated woods of Europe or worried by the European intolerances. Here I feel Jewish because I am a Jew and above all because I was forced to be a Jew, but I am not religious. I fear the fanatism of nationalism and of religions. I have always been an internationalist and nature made me planetary. To be born and to die, this law is common to all species. All that is born on this planet has the right to live on it."

In Stuttgart Krajcberg learned everything about the great movements of Modern Art (Cubism, Cezanne,etc., were discussed), and Nazi prohibitions. He saw Bauhaus and Expressionists exhibitions. He even saw paintings by Hitler. "After all I had gone through, I felt closer to Expressionism than to Concretism. Even with Baumeister, I was never attracted by Concretism....it was too intellectual for me." Baumeister's teaching was open, stimulating and generous. He had adopted the Bauhaus spirit and revealed all its techniques. In order to help students, Baumeister had created a prize out of his own pocket. Krajcberg won it twice. Baumeister advised him to go to Paris. He gave him a letter of introduction to Leger, who was happy to hear
from his friend.

For awhile, after Krajcberg left Stuttgart, he became a lost man. "I went into moral decadence, no longer knew how to support myself. I hated people. I avoided them. It took me years to go into anyone's home. I isolated myself completely. I drank and smoked too much. But in such seclusion, why live?"

In Paris, Krajcberg managed to contact some collectors, some buyers, especially in English-speaking countries.” I sold all the gouaches I had done in my hotel room to Rosa Fried, for her gallery in New York.” Sometimes he exchanged paintings for meals in restaurants like La Coupole and The Hongrois Patrick. At La Coupole he met Sartre and the sculptor Giacometti, whom he greatly admired at the time and still does. Paris stimulated him, but he had stopped painting.

“I felt the need to create things that had actual dimension, not paintings. I made impressions, reliefs. Pieces of nature. Soon I could no longer work in Paris. Where to find my land? I exchanged Paris for Minas (a Brazilian province). Up until 1967, I brought wood from Brazil to Paris. But I was always missing a piece. Later, I began to think that this process of taking wood from Minas to work in Paris was false. It was sculpting for the sake of sculpting, for society had thus defined it.”
In fact, this was against Krajcberg’s character. He was interested in showing the possibilities offered by nature. Nature preceded Tachism and all conventions of art. “If man imitates nature unknowingly, that is his problem. Nature always existed. The artist should not only seek nature, but also be part of his time.
We have witnessed the third industrial revolution, that of electronics. How can one live in the electronic image? The artist lives in society and expresses what he experiences. Le Parc did this, he followed the electronic revolution.

But what is second nature for artists in the cities is not the same for me. That is why I never tried to join the group of the New Realists, which I knew well. I belong to the minority that know the importance of nature for the future of men, and my works express this. I exchanged my house for an airplane ticket to Rio.
Nature gave me strength, gave me back the pleasure of feeling, thinking working and surviving. I walked through the forest and discovered life. Pure life: to be, change, continue, receive light, heat, humidity. When with nature I think the truth, I speak the truth, I demand of myself to be true. When I look at it, I feel in rythm with birth, death, life's continuity.”

Krajcberg built his house/studio in the forest. He collected orchids. Wild animals adopted him.
“The mountains were so beautiful that I wanted to dance. They go from black to white, passing through all the colours. I marvelled at the convulsive waves of vegetation growing on the rocks. I was moved by the beauty and asked myself how to produce art to reflect this beauty. One feels poor in the face of so much visual wealth. It distressed me, I felt fear. My work is a long-living struggle with nature, I could show a fragment of this beauty. And this I did. But I cannot repeat this gesture to infinity. How to make this piece of wood mine? How to express my emotion? Where is my participation in this life that includes me and exceeds me?
Up to now I have not dominated nature, I learned to work with it. It is my culture, and it is neither mundane nor primitive! I have my wealth and the artistic experience I draw from it. Its shapes have become mine, I contribute what I can to enlarge the social sensibility and conscience. But I do not force anything. I have changed my work whenever I felt it was needed. Did I change? No. I only found another nature.”

Each time Krajcberg went to a different place his work changed. He started to photograph in order to see better, closer. He discovered colors, the pure pigments of earth, colors which are materials. Ochre, gray, brown, green, an immense range of reds. Since 1964, these colors came from Minas and he had a good supply from Nova Vicosa. He would gather earth in the form of stones which he broke with a hammer and sifted very finely. In doing this, Krajcberg called attention to earth in Brazil:
“When I saw the mangrove I was impressed. I come from Tachism, from the Abstractionism of Paris. How to capture the movement of this mangrove? How to capture the life of those shapes, their variety, their changes, their vibrations? I felt I reencountered the Amazonian forest.

The idea occurred to me in Minas, but it was in Paris that I did my first ‘sombras recortadas’ (cutout shadows). I wanted to break the square, emerge from the frame. I had more than one reason for this. Nature ignores the square-movement gyrates. Matter organizes itself in constructive shapes; this happens in rock crystals or in skin cells. Those structures move; the skin breathes. Life is not a square. The world changes each day. life does not have fixed shapes. I wanted to discover new shapes. Nature offered me thousands of those trunks in geometric planes.

Later, I started to work with projected shadows. I worked at night, with lights projecting shadows on a board. My research consisted of testing illuminations to select a shadow. There is an infinity of shadows. No man casts the same shadow and the shadow of a man is always moving. There are complex, confused shadows. The choice is not easy. I wanted to harmonize the object with its shadow. I tried to find the object in its shadow.
I sought in nature a possibility of rebirth, the life of art uniting it to different shapes, captured from it. The shapes imposed the color. Perhaps that color which rendered it more visible in the light. Monochromy united dissociated elements. I wanted to avoid natural polychromy. Woods were different. Polychromy would act as a painting, which I did not wish. I tried to learn how an object transforms itself in entering another context, another family, how do heterogeneous beings unite. This disturbed me. A movement existed.”

The discussions at CNAC made this clear. They occurred twice a week, after the projection of Krajcberg’s slides. He became aware that, in wishing to give nature the life of the art, he was creating art for art's sake. He wanted not only to work with nature, but to defend it at a time in which the third technological revolution allowed man's folly to develope absolute means for its destruction.

“We experience today two meanings of nature: the ancestral part of the planet and the modern one of industrial urban conquest. What is really important is that these two meanings are to be experienced and assumed in the totality of the ontological structure of each of them. The integral naturalism, in opposition to realisms, is not a metaphor of power, but a hygiene of perception, another state of sensibility, the individual passage to the planetary conscience.

The Amazonian nature challenges one’s modern sensibility. It also challenges the scale of esthetic values traditionally recognized. When Mondrian went from the tree to the square, he only took advantage of one of the possibilities of the tree. Now we must break the square to find the tree again. Integral Nature may give a new meaning to the individual values of sensibility and creativity.”

Krajcberg’s Manifesto was made public in Rio, on the day in which Brazil was opened to Democracy – the military had just amnestied their opponents. It was the first discussion after the dictatorship, and the destruction of forests had not yet been mentioned. The attacks were violent. Some would not accept the fact that their "gringos" would talk about Brazil. The polemic continued in Sao Paulo and Brasilia. The Manifesto was presented in Curitiba, New York, Paris, Rome and Milan. He asked:“Why does man destroy the natural wealth when he knows that the planet is being depleted and that without it his life in the planet will be impossible?
Why does Brazil allows itself to become a desert when it is one of the richest countries on the planet? For immediate gain in lots, forests are destroyed, resulting in long term destruction, together with utter poverty.
Why give up basic cultivations for the benefit of industrial monoculture? Can the Earth bear this?”
The problems imposed by the technological evolution are pollution and over-population. Artistic thinking confirms with sorrow that contemporary society is a commercial machine. What is the artist's place in view of these problems?”

For Krajcberg, his artwork is a manifesto.

“I do not write. I am not a politician. I must find the right image. Fire is death, an abyss. Fire has been with me forever. My message is tragic: I show crime. The other face of a technology without control, the abyss. I bring evidence, I put documents together and I add. I want to import to my rebellion the most dramatic and the most violent aspects. If I could spread ashes over everything I would come close to what I feel.
There are evidently in my work cultural reminiscences, war reminiscences, which emerge from my subconscious. With all the racism, the anti-semitism, I experienced in Europe I could not do any other kind of art. But I live in the present. I express what I saw yesterday in Mato Grosso, in the Amazon or in the State of Bahia. I show the anti-nature violence practiced on behalf of life. I express the rebellion of the planet's conscience. Destruction has shapes, although it speaks of the non-existent.

I do not try to sculpt; I seek shapes for my cry. This burnt husk is me. I feel myself in wood and in stone. Animistic? Yes! Visionary? No! I am a participant in the moment. My only wish is to express all I feel. It is a struggle without truce. To paint pure music is not easy. How to make a sculpture scream as if it had a voice?"

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http://www.web.net/~storfrnt/

Note:The illustrations for this article were provided by Leon Kaplan,Toronto.