Saga do Guerreiro Morto

(Saga of the Dead Warrior)

My commentary

Elaborating the first project for the Pequeno Mobiliário Brasileiro (Brazilian Small Furniture) that was never accomplished, I was inclined to make a tour among fallen figures, many of them with violent death. We must remember that we were in the early 1970s and that a military regime had been growing in Brazil for some years and that we were all alert. It had been a short time since my Imagens de Urgência (Emergency Images) and the subject still haunted me. What was once a ball just politically incorrect, I mean the first project for Pequeno Mobiliário... (... Small Furniture), became a macabre dance.

Sketches and annotations imagined what would have happened to this or that whose fate was only vague news; and what could happen ...
There were those who insisted on defending an ideal, others rebelled against the state of things. Warriors, therefore.

There were those who insisted on defending an ideal, others rebelled against the state of things. Warriors, therefore.

And in Guernica, Picasso, I found the portrait of the feared suffering in the female figures and the portrait of the suffering present in the dead warrior in the foreground.

Lonely, with his broken sword, the warrior seen in Guernica is often interpreted as "Spain defeated by facism," "hero of inglorious resistance," "defeat of the oppressed before the oppressor," and so many other equally easy and pamphletary interpretations. It is likely that Picasso thought so, as they say, given the circumstance of that painting.

I went further, or more profoundly, helped by the elaboration of the "upholstered" of the four female figures whose tragedies I illuminated with Portinari, our "official painter"; with Duchamp and the lamp of Étand Donné; The Massacre of the Innocents of Poussin, examples of the physical posture for these four women in their suffering. A universe where my figures began to breathe.

It is in this context that the figure of the dead warrior refers to legendary heroes, super-structural examples for our daily life ("living is dangerous", says Guimarães Rosa in Grande Sertão, Veredas, or "one must live life in cold blood" of the poem flag> cummings> dalí of Roberto Bicelli. But there is the broken sword! A failed Durindana? Tizona wielded by the dead?

From these I was very touched by Chanson de Roland, anonymous of the XII century, originally in Langue D'Oil that I do not know, whose last verse I transcribe the Canto CLXXV in the Italian version wich I have:

Il conte Orlando giace sotto un pino,
verso la Spagna tiene volto il viso.
Di molte cose gli ritorna alla mente,
di tante terre quante ne prese il prode,
la dolce Francia, quelli del suo lignaggio

Carlomagno che l’allevò, suo signore;
non può impedirsi di sospirare e pianger

In assisted translation:

Count Rolando lies under a pine tree
towards Spain, has his face is turned.
Many things come to mind:
so many lands that the valiant has conquered;
sweet France; those of his lineage;
Charlemagne, who created him, his master.
Can not help but sigh and cry.

At this point I decided that the Estofado para o Guerreiro Morto (Upholsterer for the Dead Warrior) would be  a performance

That's why I've been wandering around this character, often imagining it as my alter ego.

To the series of these notes and drawings I gave the name Saga do Guerreiro Morto (Saga of the Dead Warrior), which it is.

One of these sketches, De Alonso Cano para o Guerreiro Morto (From Alonso Cano toward  the Dead Warrior), inspired by a small drawing, 16X15 cm, by Alonso Cano, XVII century, in which the naked, sturdy female body resting languidly, served as a model so that, by making it masculine, it preserved the delicacy and sensuality that indicate the end of other emergencies, generated a finished drawing that is no longer with me. Of this I only have one poor quality photograph  included as a mere document. It takes the simple title: Desenho (Drawing).
_{Gabriel Borba 2019}

PS: Ben Murphy, Priceton University, USA, asks me if I recognize the relationship between My Name is not Ivald Granato, in Mitos Vadios (Stray Miths) and the video performance presented at MIS in the same 1978. 

I say that at MIS I remade the Dead Warrior that, as I declared to Martha Araújo, artist from the same Gallery as I,  this character from Pequeno Mobiliário Brasileiro(Small Brazilian Furniture) is a kind of alter ego of mine, reporting me to Orlando, personage of Chanson de Roland, anonymous of the XII century.

Let's measure things: Ciccillo Matarazo and Ivald Granato are not up to the task, nor are white chickens, even though with medallions, compared to Durindana... But broom handle, in the circumstance, is a good metaphor of the sword, even if in child's play...

The dialogue with Martha went by:

Martha Araújo: (...) Get it understood, Gabriel: first you accessed the saga of the dead warrior to build the Small Brazilian Furniture. To find the dead warrior you used the image of of a woman by Alonso (Cano), that you dressed as a man because you wanted a male warrior, not a female warrior.

Gabriel Borba: For the Dead Warrior I used the warrior (who is in Guernica de Picasso). And a self-portrait. What I called Saga (of the Dead Warrior) was the set of notes I made building the posture that interested me most

M.A.: One more question: why did you departed from Guernica to build the Pequeno Mobiliário Brasileiro?

G.B.: Actually I was first instructed by Portinari. At that time I found between north and south of the country (Northeast and Southeast) the representative tension of Brazilianness, portrayed in the series Retirantes by Portinari. I saw the Brazilian Furniture, in this sense, in Enterro na Rede (Burial in the Hammock). One of his paintings, whose title I do not remember, has a structure (not composition) similar to the distribution of Guernica's figures, by Picasso: density of characters to the right of the observer and few ones to the left, typically symbolic animals mixed with humans...  And the Dead Child present in both Picasso and Portinari. To these two Ps I added a third one, Poussin and his Killing of the Innocents.

I saw in Guernica the challenge of transforming pictural structures (Wölfflin's term) into physical structures to bring the imaginary furniture to the concrete plane. (...) "a set of furniture, sun loungers and hammocks, to receive the suffering figures of Guernica," according to Jean-Marc Prevost curator of the exhibition Picasso. Les temps des Conflits. And to me, Poussin was the finished example of the postures of the aggressor, the beaten and the defender.

M.A.: And why the need to be a warrior and not a warrior

G.B.: The Dead Warrior is my Alter Ego. He refers, as well, to Orlando Furioso, as described by Ariosto. This shoe fits me as much as I get emotional with Ariosto's verses.  Still I used as a model a female image that helped me to add delicacy to the character. Men and Women are complementary opposites. This nude by Alonso Cano, incorporated as a model, accomplishes the desired complementarity.