The poet, the sculptor and criticism: Murilo Mendes and Giacometti

Abstract

In his work on “Alberto Giacometti”, published in Retratos-Relâmpago, the Brazilian poet Murilo Mendes searches a comprehension of Giacometti’s work through a text that, moving away from the usual procedures of traditional art critic, directs itself to the fragmentary and groping form that characterizes the essay. For his intuition of Giacometti’s
art, Murilo Mendes turns to the meaning derived from the collision of distant aspects of reality with no relation to the usual universum of art, mingling his text to the procedures of image – and therefore creating a critical thought which is dependent of the use and expansion of metaphor. The meaning that the critic/poet extracts from Giacometti’s
work has its roots in the negative configuration of the sculptures (they are, according to Murilo Mendes, rather denial of space, than space itself), which in turn implies formal and social-historical consequences (the reduction of matter and its relation with violence, the risk of anonymity, the limits of human identity in the 1950s).