This hitherto unpublished statement by the Brazilian sculptor José [de Moura] Resende [Filho] (b. 1945) was recorded in the late 1970s by Sônia Prieto who, at that time, was a researcher at the IDART (Departamento de Informação e Documentação Artística da Secretaria Municipal de Cultura de São Paulo), which is now the Centro Cultural São Paulo. In this interview, Resende discusses his art production and the critical role he and other artists played (beginning in the mid-1960s) to raise awareness by forming a common, and more specifically independent, front to challenge the art circuit of the period. In 1966 and 1967, Resende joined forces with Wesley Duke Lee, Geraldo de Barros, Nelson Leirner, Frederico Nasser, and Carlos Fajardo to form the Grupo Rex that founded the exhibition space Rex Gallery & Sons and the magazine Rex Time. From 1970 to 1974, Resende helped with the founding of the Centro de Experimentação Artística Escola Brasil, in São Paulo, where he and Paulo Baravelli, Nasser, and Fajardo were all teachers. In 1975, in Rio de Janeiro, he cofounded the magazine Malasartes, together with the critic Ronaldo Brito and the artists Waltercio Caldas, Carlos Zílio, and Cildo Meireles, among others.
Malasartes, the art magazine that was published in Brazil in the mid-1970s, appeared just three times during the period 1975 to 1976. It was a critical, irreverent journal that featured essays and reviews by critics and artists (most of them from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), and translations of international art articles that were considered relevant at the time. It also republished material that had already appeared in other Brazilian publications, and ran movie and experimental poetry reviews. The magazine’s goal was to contribute to the debate on Brazilian contemporary art from an independent perspective, siding with no particular movement, in order to analyze the function of art as part of Brazilian culture.
Ronaldo Brito, one of the contributors to Malasartes, detects “a modern calling for the current reality” at the heart of the Brazilian sculptor José Resende’s work (see “Em forma de mundo” [doc. no. 1111278]).