Stances of ( in ) visibility of the female Negro body : focusing on portinari ’ s pictorial aesthetics

Current analysis investigates the manner identity constitution and black female’s visual representation in Portinari’s iconography is shown within the theoretical presuppositions of the French Discourse Analysis in alignment with the theoretical bases of Peirce’s Semiotics, the History of the Body and Cultural Studies. The social and the political factors are understood through an interpretative stance, within the paradoxical state of intangible significant materiality. The descriptive, interpretative, archeological and genealogical movement showed that the half-naked body is presented as erotic, perceived as exotic and treated as profane. The movement also showed that sensuality is signified and resignified by the marginal since it works with discursive memory which conceives the exotic as an order opposed to existence, namely the profane order, and the place in which the subjects of difference encounter one another.


Introduction
Since Renaissance, the human body image has lied on morphology which lies, on its turn on anatomy and dissection, still practiced in Arts schools in late 19th century and for a long period in the 20th century.Drawing, painting and modelling bodies meant to capture them naked in their anatomic truth and afterwards, attire them according to the circumstances of the scene or of the action 1 (Translated from: Yves Michaud -Visualizações: o corpo e as artes visuais).
Studies and investigations on the figurative plastic image -the picture whose focus of visual 1 Desde o Renascimento, a representação do corpo humano repousava sobre a morfologia, e esta sobre a anatomia e a dissecação, ainda praticadas nas escolas de arte no final do século XIX e mesmo um bom tempo durante o século XX.Desenhar, pintar, modelar os corpos, significava captá-los nus em sua verdade anatômica e, depois, vesti-los como o mandavam as circunstâncias da cena ou da ação (Yves Michaud -Visualizações: o corpo e as artes visuais).
representation constitutes the human figure, and thus conceiving the pictorial materiality as discursive practice (TASSO, 2003) -have triggered reflections on the identity constitution and on the body in its "blurred frontiers between the individual and the social, male and female, life and death, nature and culture, natural and artificial, presence and absence, actuality and virtuality" (SANTAELLA, 2006, p. 28).This is due to the complexity inherent to its composition and to the fact that iconography establishes one of the most ancient links between humans and the symbolic medium.
Within such problematization, since the Renaissance, the nakedness of the body corresponds to a practice that takes hold of this materiality in its anatomical constitution.When the body is transformed into an art object, it is fragmented by the scene's reminiscences that unite it, by the subject that constitutes it and by the artistic sensitiveness through which it was apprehended.If natural beauty is attributed to the naked, unblemished body, represented by forms and volumes, the naked body becomes currently emblematic and problematic.This is due to bio-political, ethical and aesthetic procedures of itself and of others since it is a discharge towards shamefulness.Making the body visible and perceptible involves a counter-order and a condition of denunciative existence to grope the unstable and the limitless ground of the imagined body which is built by discourse and materialized by visual language.With these social and political considerations in mind, the representations of marginal and national iconography, amalgamated and circumscribed within the field of arts, are given.They make mandatory questions on body images, problematizing them in their materialization within the different stances of visibility and of inscription surfaces.
Owing to dynamics produced by last generation technology, current possibilities for the amplification of the body and its spectacularity have been deepened and extended in the case of paintings.More than warranting the quality of the manufacturing of such virtual imagistic materialization, modern means for mechanical reproduction and, consequently, for similar artistic artifacts, ranging from the "mechanization of the figure shapes" (DUBOIS, 2004) to the computerfrom the physical and chemical to the electronicestablish the possibility of what has been unique to transform itself into something that may be reproduced, duplicated and multiplied.It may be thus available to all who are integrated within the computer network.However, paintings subjected to current stance of visibility may be displaced from a single and fixed site of exposition to another one which may be susceptible to potentially transform the body by infography.This place may be considered a sort of unusual extension of physical sites whose developments comply with conformations that destitute it of its original state.In this case, the reproduction and the massification processes transpose the original painting to a paradoxical state of intangible significant materiality within the virtual order.However, if on the one hand, it democratizes the work of art, on the other hand, it submits its status to the field of architectonic unstableness.The reproduction of a pictorial work of art may be achieved in such a way that its artistic characteristics may be destroyed, fragmented or imploded in the process, as described by Benjamin (2000).
Although the production of paintings precedes the advent of the computer, the manufacturing of technology-based visual objects produces a gaze which is displaced from the conventional manner.Experience which is attributed to the contact with a work of art in a conventional museum is dissimilar to that in a virtual museum or to that seen through another electronic medium.A manner is instituted through such a mechanism and order by which something is lost since the unique -the source matter -cannot be seen, and something is gained due to the opportunity of accessing a type of gaze amalgamated to the representation of the human body displaced from the constituting anatomical truth.Further, the virtual museum is an interactivity space with important heritages that warrants it the identity and the memory proper to a national community.This is actually a condition for the irruption of a pictorial aesthetic order.
Under the aegis of different gaze modalities, (re)production technologies and the propagation of current figurative plastic images, specific stances of meaning production are instituted, iconographic reading practices emerge, research and investigations on types of materiality are required which are placed on the crossroads that unite art, language and politics.Due to their inherent particularities, they demand theoretical and analytic approaches that would comprehend the visual enunciation which is compiled by representation and archeologicalgenealogical conditions -from transparency to enunciatory opacity -implying articulation with language, history and memory.This is untrodden ground when space is not that of the arts but educational space, when one tries to apprehend discourse within its workings.
Given all the particularities imposed by the reading practice of a fixed painting and the particular way discursive practices produce identities, current research involves a reading of the visual representation of a female Negro painted in 1936 by Cândido Portinari.The discursive functioning of regularities that attribute subjectification to the sensuality of the female in the picture may thus be verified.The identity constitution of a subject split by meanings of marginalized social, profane and political conditions is reported.From such a perspective, the theoretical and methodological compass of the French Discourse Analysis, coupled to the theoretical bases of Peirce's Semiotics, the History of the Body and Cultural Studies shall be employed.
Portinari's iconographic production, circumscribed within the discursive practices on Brazilian subjects painted on canvas, reveals the social and identity constitution of the country.It is a condition for the theoretical and analytic reflections undertaken in the essay on the processes of the female Negro's visual representation and identity constitution.So that the manner the social and the political stance are inscribed in Portinari's iconographic discourse may be understood, the paintings are conceived as historical evidence."They report eye witness's activities […]" that represent "[…] that and only that seen by an eye witness from a specific point within a given moment" (BURKE, 2004, p. 17-18).
A status of social, cultural, political and discursive practice is attributed to Portinari's art since it comprises the heritage of constitutive activities of Brazilian culture and since it materializes through visual language a significant compound from which the discursive characteristics cannot be taken away.Opacities and interdictions, which cannot be excluded from these discourses, are implied in the possibility that this significant materiality may circumscribe itself to meaning networks by which the representation and the subjectification of the female Negro may be understood in the discursiveness of its existence.

Regularity traces by eye witness: convergent gaze
The idealization of the female Negro as a sensual symbol is an inheritance of the Portuguese colonizing society.Throughout the 16 th Century the Portuguese's colonial practice was based on the extension and delimitation of their dominions and failed to give special attention to the "purity" of Portuguese nationality (FREYRE, 1980).Since miscegenation had never been a real problem to the Portuguese, the female Negro was increasingly circumscribed within a network of meanings in which sensuality, shamelessness and desire were the qualities that defined her in the eyes and in the imaginary of the European colonizer.Due to the scarcity of white females, the Portuguese male tended towards "the voluptuous contact with the exotic female" (FREYRE, 1980, p. 264).In fact, for many centuries, the female Negro has been marginalized.The process comprising the construction of the exotic body, her existence put to shame and the profanation of her image achieved the ethnic condition that became an identity exclusion background.The dermal scheme became a reference to the updating of memory on the female Negro in various fields of knowledge.According to Nora (1993, p. 9): memory is life, always borne by living groups.That is why it is in permanent evolution, open to the dialectics of remembrance and forgetfulness, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to all uses and manipulations, susceptible to long hibernation and sudden revitalizations.History is always the problematic and incomplete reconstruction of what doesn't exist anymore.Memory is an always updated phenomenon, a link lived in the eternal present; history is the representation of the past.Since it is affective and magical, memory is not liable to details that face it; on the contrary, it lives on vague, telescopic, global or fluctuating remembrances, specific or symbolic, sensitive to all transferences, scenes, censure or projections.Due to the fact that history is an intellectual and lay achievement, it requires analysis and critical discourse.Memory puts remembrance within the sacred.History frees it and makes it prosaic.Memory emerges from a group that it unites which, as Halbwachs states, there are as many memories as population groups; it is naturally multiple and slow, collective, plural and individualized.Contrastingly, history belongs to all and to no one, which gives it a universal aspect.Memory is rooted in the concrete, in space, in a gesture, in the image, in an object.History is merely linked to temporal continuities, evolutions and the relationships of things.Memory is absolute and history is limited to the relative.
Within such a perspective, knowledge, that determines the constitution and the maintenance of discursive memory of the female Negro either in an associate field or in its evolution, is the result of a set of constructs hailing from the patriarchal regime, from a concept of Western and Christian womenwhose values are exclusively due to European-born females -and from the cultural concept that the tropical female -especially, as in the current case, who comes from Africa -has been marked, due to her uncultured nature, as an incomplete, barbarian and crude specimen.
The above notes give evidence and make explicit the ways of representation and the identity constitution of the female Negro.They may be completed by the fact that Africans have been displaced and brought to Brazil within a slave regime.They became merchandise and sold as animals for work on the plantations, in homes and in the gold mines.Since these facts are inconvenient to national history, a great deal of effort has been spent for their erasure, among which may be mentioned the institution of "compensatory" policies for past injustices.However, all the schemes for the erasure of the residues of slavery that "degrades" Brazilian historiography fail to deprive the vivacity of resistance, which is inherent to the constitutive memory of cultural and discursive practices on the subjects' identity.
The site allotted to the female Negro converges towards the constitution of an imaginary characterized by social and political inferiority.This may be perceived when manual labor, domestic work and the satisfaction of the sexual fantasies of the "masters" are ascribed to her.Consequently, the possibility exists that discourses of marginalization on the female Negro seize the body as reference and promote the maintenance of exclusion policies.This fact is due to the degrading enunciation with regard to the female Negro of a discourse which is established by relationships with that external to it; more specifically, because of that which is external is constructed by meanings of difference.In this case, identity is marked by difference, by symbols, by contrasts by cultural, social and economical oppositions place within the fragile limits which distinguish segregation and congregation (WOODWARD, 2000).It is the reason why the female Brazilian Negro emerges from the conflicts and the contradictions of the country's history.
The identities produced in these discourses cause the promotion of difference.Identity and difference, resulting from symbolical and discursive processes, form two dependent entities, made up by the subjects' subjectification and objectification.Thus, they establish the sites to be occupied by the subjects and the behavior modes by which they may socially (inter)act.Identity and difference in Portinari's paintings analyzed in this paper have close connections with power relationships since "the power to define identity and mark differences cannot be separated from the wider reaches of authority" (HALL, 2000, p. 81).
Between the social and the political: the brazilianness of the painter in Brazil The porosity and the limitlessness of frontiers between the social and the political, reported by eye witnesses, and the emergence of "[…] movements and projects in our search of Brazil, to recover for ourselves and, above all, for the new generations, the creative works of men and women who built our art and culture", make up the heritage of the works of our national artists, a broad and important "body of works that defines what it means to be Brazilian" (PORTINARI, 2000, p. 369).From such a perspective, these pictorial productions have a specific technique and a critical and sensitive ideology of the period's social and cultural stance.According to Azevedo (1963), such attributes give vigor to Portinari's style.In fact, they emphasize the portrayed immortalized reality within the social landscape of Brazilian humanity.While integrating this type of Brazilian iconographic collection, Portinari's works are highly marked by a fondness towards marginal, ordinary and national themes which, according to Azevedo (1963), characterized his artistic achievements as an innovator and a renovator of Modern aesthetics.His singularity is at present highlighted by the revealing of a subversive order in which the sensuality of the female Negro emerges in the midst of lights and shades.This process makes legible the intangibility of the distorted body produced by the constitutive memory on the female Negro in colonial Brazil.Conditions are thus produced from the articulation between language, history and memory so that the political and the social may be understood.They are, in fact, the marks of the painter's self-portrait, according to the passage in a 1929 letter to relatives in Brazil.In this European written manuscript the flimsy limit between the subjects of discourse and the subject in the discourse are enunciated.
[...] in spite of the fact that I have Florentine blood running in my veins, in Florence about which Romain Rolland remarked: "feverish, proud, in which everyone was free and everyone was a tyrant, where it was splendid to live and where life was hell," I feel an outsider.It was from this place that I could see my town the better; I could see Brodósqui as it is.I don't wish to do anything.I will paint the Balaim; I will gather all those people with those clothes and that color.When I started painting, I felt I should paint my own people and I managed to paint Dance on the plantation.Then they changed my mind and I started to paint without any scope in my mind.(-) The landscape in which I played for the first time and the people with whom I spoke for the first time do not emerge from me anymore.When I return, I will try to paint my country.I wear varnished shoes, large trousers, low collar and discuss Wilde; however, in my heart of hearts I dress very much like Balaim and I do not understand Wilde [...] (apud MOREIRA, 2001, p. 69 -our italics).
Balaim represents the nationalist trigger in Portinari.In a foreign land the painter is struck by Brazilianness which constitutes him and materializes itself in the enunciations of figurative plastic arts.Clothes and colors of people from Brodósqui abound on the artist's canvas and perpetuate the image of those who represent the fundamental prime matter to the national identity under construction.Under Modernists' ideals, Portinari's gaze goes wayward from the precepts of European art and features characteristics, that is established by the implosion of aesthetic formality, the denial of the obvious and the treatment of simple things on a day basis.Portinari's works portray, according to such enunciation modes, up till then, rare paintings of ethnic and social and cultural identities.The symbolic value of these identities is precisely on the threshold of the social, political and aesthetic matrix that makes up the individual and the collective.Under such identities his observation of the "Balaims" is formed.From them he traces the social, cultural and aesthetic differences which are constitutive of Brazilian historicity and not overseas developments which model behavior ideals of "the well-schooled and the well-educated".They are the determining subject, place and moment and the constituting elements of Portinari's discursive art composition and iconography.
Even if the manner Portinari's iconography portrays Brazil, specifically the female Negro, does not consist in the "documentary of color and form of a painful anomaly, conscious of Brazilian reality", as Martins (s/d. apud BALBI, 2003, p. 50) remarks, the nationalism coming forth from such portraits is not "a triumphal exaltation of Brazil and its people, but a severe social critique forwarded towards an unsatisfactory and unsatisfied reality".They are specificities and characterizations which treat Portinari's paintings on the female Negro, as Burke (2004) stated, as an eye witness whose focus is chiefly social, political and aesthetic.Discourse, materialized in pictorial art, inscribes the portrayed subjects within marginality and thus excluded people within the network of silenced ones.
The artistic and discursive conformation attributed to Portinari's paintings reveals to the observer, within the visibility or the tangible plane, visual representations of ethnically female Negroes.They are delineated by curves, enhancing the upper and lower members which are regularly represented as strong and enormous.Such regularity makes the gaze painful since their female bodies portray deformed shapes and bring forth monstrous bodies -effect of the apparent disharmony between volume, proportion, lines, color, texture and size.Within the intangible order, the feelings manifested by the figures are imperative and dense.In fact, among the overcharged colors and lines, the characteristics of physical strength, struggle, resistance, sorrow, tenderness, fear, demands and indifference are inherent to the figures portrayed.A series of meanings, found in the text transparency and opacity, is constructed from the dynamics and the mobility of pictorial language."Meanings in a work of art do not translate that which has been seen or understood by the artist as a piece of information" but that which is revealed in the form of themes, concepts, ideas and identities (TASSO, 2003, p. 28).
The choices which refer to objects that put clothes on the represented body or put them off give visibility to discourses circumscribed in the plastic image.Colors, cloths, textures and transparencies lead the spectator's eye towards the recovery of the history of the subjects under analysis.This may be worked either by the cultural role attributed to clothing or by interdiscursive memory of a common imaginary.The representation of the female whose sensuality is shown in a pronounced way formalizes the denunciation of a subject allegedly unbound by morals and by dogmatic values taught by Western and Christian ideology.It is the constitution of the subject inscribed within the profane.

Sensuality of (un)desired bodies in portinari's works
The sensual Negro body painted by Portinari incorporates significant materiality.When its visual constitution is analyzed, such factors as points, lines, shape, color, texture, movement and others function as "a weakened structuring chain whose specific materiality […] is exposed to the production of meanings" (LAGAZY, 2008, p. 1).Specificities limited to the pictorial make explicit the manner the Negro body is represented and signified in the discursive and visual materiality through interpretation.In fact, legibility is established through the enunciation function which brings forth the corporeal-biological matter as a referential of what is enunciated.The articulation of language and history is thus achieved.
The bodily discourse is thus constituted by significant re-entries that may characterize in what manner, within its functioning, it produces, induces, promotes, illustrates and repeats the social and political meanings.This is a splitting movement which is instituted because the two categories are constitutive of discourse in its confluence.When Foucault (1996, p. 38-45) establishes elements that posit discourse disruption in a certain order, he proposes the existence of anonymous rules through which discourse constitutes itself within a doctrinarian, restrictive and excluding system.In Portinari's female Negro the many types of discursivity which emerge throughout the slavery regime form the crucial factors of these rules.Discourses on the Negro in Brazil materialize themselves in the updating of a memory in which the represented body partakes of the exclusion order.This is due to the fact that the slave body, either as obedient or as rebellious, has been attributed the social danger, with trends towards "eroticism, loafing and crime […]" (LOBO, 2008, p. 143 -our italics).Such discourse which breaks through in a moment of history of Brazilianness circulates as the truth which triggers the silent, albeit efficient, knowledge-power (FOUCAULT, 1982) that institutes a matrix of knowledge on the Brazilian Negro and forms a memory network updated at each re-appearance of the widely-spread enunciation.Loafing, eroticism, and criminality are ways of existence constituted outside normality and are specifically constituents of the profane in contrast to the sacred.Eliade (1992, p. 14-15) states that: the sacred and the profane are two modes of being in the world; two existential situations incorporated by man throughout history.These modes of being in the world are not merely of any interest to the history of religions or to sociology.In fact, they do not form only the object of historical, sociological and ethnological studies.The manner of being sacred and profane depends on the different positions that man achieved in the Cosmos and, consequently, they are of any interest not only to the philosopher but also to any investigator who desires to know the possible dimensions of human existence.
When the places they occupy in modern societies are taken into account, both the sacred and the profane make up two orders in which the subjects may inscribe themselves in the world.The female inscribed in the sacred order becomes a site and a place of departure for the organization that constitutes difference.Her attributes re-member, within the disorder of (i)material things, the fragments that prop up society.The Christian and industrial ideals converge themselves towards the identity of the female that builds her home when she establishes direct links with the greater myth and sacralizes human existence.
The profane pictorial space lies in the fragmentation of the conditions of human existence in the wake of the loss of references that guide man to act as from the needs detected in the historical conditions in which he is inscribed.However, even within the experience with the profane, "sacred places" may be constructed which disrupt the posited logic of the profane and sacralized experiences are thus instituted in the private order.Within its universality, the case of the Negro female may be taken as a profane place, or rather, the order and the manner of constitution that confer to the profane the proper and natural space to the female Negro.Through slavery she became the object of desire.Through its distance from the criteria established by the Christian logic towards the female, she became exotic, featuring a different nature, and attractive to the male gaze.In Portinari's painting Woman and child (Figure 1 Portinari, 1936(PORTINARI, 2009).
The child is also portrayed in the foreground within the same milieu in which the marginalized female figure is posited.Woman and child are placed within the external and peripheral foreground, featuring proximity which is evidenced by physical contact and space occupation.In the woman's gesture, there is the hand that touches, caresses and protects that which is part of herself, her fruit -an extension of the inter-uterine link.The womb, the body's central region and the scene's, protrudes by focusing natural light and is covered by shades linked to the parts that are released from the luminous beams.The space that separates them is exactly the length of the woman's arm extended up to the child's head which is figured with the physical shapes and appearances similar to that of a smallsized adult.The enormity of the portrayed subjects' arms, hands, legs and feet is a feature of dehumanization which confers abnormality to the bodies highlighted by the scene`s hyperbolic vigor.
Since, on a lesser plane, space administers possible meanings, this datum reclaims the marginal space.Although it shows urban space, it brings forth the discourse of what has been ignored by urban society.The shantytown shown is the locus of exclusion since it gives place to those whose possibility of living is made up of a marginalized way of living, such as "a being set at the margin" (CAMPOS; TASSO, 2010).
The half-naked body is shown to be erotic, seen as exotic and treated as profane.Contrastingly to the political, the female Negro on the canvas fails to adhere to a behavior established as "normal".Although the exotic does not deny the natural, it circumscribes it by equivocated factors (LAGAZZY, 2008).The visual representation is characterized by the discursive functioning through the overlaying of the political and the social onto the exotic and the profane.Sensuality is re-signified through the marginal since it works with discursive memory that the exotic constitutes a counter-existence order, or rather, a site in which the subjects of difference meet.
Split identity, in which sensuality and maternity are excluded, since the former overdetermines the latter, attributes to the subject an identity constitution that circumscribes and re-takes the marginal.This is due to the fact that it inhabits the dominion of difference and thus that of exclusion.The discourse of sensuality in the identity constitution and in the representation of the female Negro is a mark in Portinari's iconography that articulates discourses of exclusion within the opposition between the sacred and the profane.It is the condition by the opacity veiling of the representation of the sensual Negro body signified in and by history.

Final considerations
Within the meaning matrixes in Portinari's portraits, the existence of a convergence of the social and the political is highlighted in the formulation of the artistic activity-discourse by which the visual representation and the identity constitution of the Brazilian female Negro emerge.Through the artist's discursive workings of his iconography on canvas that which is posited within (in)visibilities may be made explicit.Now, this happens because the meanings propagated by the image discourse: are not perceptible as explicit bearers of their limits and characteristics.A conversion of the gaze and attitudes are required so that they may be recognized and considered in themselves.Perhaps, they are so known that they hide indefinitely; perhaps they are like the familiar transparencies that, although they do not hide anything in their thickness, they are not presented in total clarity.The enunciation level shapes itself close by (FOUCAULT, 2008, p. 125).
An analysis of Portinari's portraits within their aesthetic and discursive spheres requires special attention not only to the milieu and to the manner of the subjects' actions and representations, but also to an interface of discourses from these spheres which are contained and recovered in each object that composes a work of art.It also means that reading practice of Portinari's works requires detailing of each component within the portrait.In fact, all components delineate and mobilize discourses on the female Negro.
The denouncing subject-position of social problems is instituted when people at the margin of Brazilian society are portrayed through the medium of pictorial discourse without the explicit evidence of some sort of social struggle.Its enunciation function is established against mainstream discourses of the period which, guided by the myth of hybridism and national unity, produce new markings of femininity and, mainly, of a negritude that claims more attentive analysis.
With regard to the historical and discursive networks which buttress the composition of Portinari's works, art is a safety-valve of enunciating subjects' discourses on the oppressed that place themselves not only against the political period in which they find themselves but also against the discourses spread widely during the period.Art's mute discourse shrieks during the periods under discussion, whilst, at present, shows the way trodden for the (re)citation, erasure and updating of discourses on gender and ethnicity which shape the singularities and subjectivities that constitute today's images of Brazil and of Brazilian populations.
), the black body, a central figure, is characterized by marks of sensuality.Breasts, womb and hips are represented by the intermittences of (in)visibilities and have their curved constitution revealed by a simple shift which, painted through an interplay of color and light, brings forth what is sublime and what is profane.It forms the constitutive texture of history and memory, of the cultural and the social which, within the splitting of the nature of the Brazilian Negro female, inscribe it within the space of marginality.