São Paulo, Brasil
28/03/2026 - 25/06/2026

Masks
Ivald Granato — Who are you?
It was the late 1990s and the eternal rebel Ivald Granato was coming of age. Thirty-five years of participating in group and individual shows and awards gave him a prominent place in the Brazilian art scene. A talented draftsman and painter, he had traveled through “isms” and Pop Art in close harmony with his time. By the way, it said: “I know the basic techniques and purposes of painting. I can make expressionist, fauvist, impressionist or any more recent trend canvases. That’s why I transformed my painting into an ironic act about what I know.

Painting, for me, is exercising the act of creating.” With this comment, Granato showed that he was aware that making art had become something totally permissive, a condition that the critic Mário Pedrosa identified as post-modern and poet Haroldo de Campos as post-everything. Without illusions, the artist surrendered to the need to create. He painted quickly, without sketches. In direct attack on the screen, it assumed gestural automatism with surrealist roots, producing a kinesthetic figuration of intense color. His painting is pure energy; his figuration sometimes resembles that of Ivald Granato. Apud Frederico de Moraes. In From the collection: the paths of Brazilian art. São Paulo. Júlio Bogoricin Real Estate, 1986. Graffiti, referring to everyday life, to hybrid and fantastic beings, to eroticism

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Awarded the best draftsman in 1979 and 1982 by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA), and his painting was shown at international exhibitions, it was in the performance that Granato was able to give vent to his restless temperament. He wanted to be recognized for his boldness and freedom of action. A pioneer in this field of activity, he made countless performance presentations, many of them documented by photographs and videos. In 1978, he invited friends to the happening Vadios Myths, a critical parody of the 1st Latin American Art Biennial in São Paulo. The event, held in a parking lot From Rua Augusta in São Paulo, which was joined by Hélio Oiticica, Marta Minujín, Claudio Tozzi, Gabriel Borba, Regina Vater and many others, went down in history. In the 1980s, he performed in the Performance Band led by José Roberto Aguilar and continued to surprise the public with his provocations at museums, lectures and on the city streets.

In life, as in art, Granato incorporated the disruptive character of performance, with touches of irony and social criticism. According to the artist, his wedding in Campos dos Goytacazes, his hometown, was his first performance.
From there he left for Rio de Janeiro where he obtained his training. Later, he settled in São Paulo, remarried, and made his studio — on the corner of Avenidas Rebouças and Henrique Schaumann — a meeting place for artists of his generation. Your busy life matched the pace of the city. I wanted to always be at the center of events. This required being in constant activity.

In 1990, he moved with his wife Laís and their children to a spacious house in Alto de Pinheiros. Gradually, he transferred his studio there. Daughter Alice tells us that
the family “lived at an absurd degree of intensity, since it was part of the processes that took place there”.
Despite the agitation that the artist was promoting, it is likely that in the beginning he would ask which of his many people would be his true identity. This concern led him to a crucial passage in his career: for a time, he abandoned his usual treatment of contemporary issues to immerse himself in the search for values from his past and his ancestry. This anamnesis promoted the recovery of childhood memories as a means of reconnecting with their origin and the country’s cultural memory. The critic Jacob Klintowitz, who had been following Granato’s work for years, observed the artist’s behavior in his moment of introspection: “First, he played with the subject, sarcastically recalled his carnivals, the dirty blocks, and the Clovis, a popular theatrical event in which an anonymous masked invective a popular person and tells him things. And finally, Ivald Granato configured ancient and imaginary masks and then his
The attitude was one of deep reverence. The artist went on a long trip during which he found himself, at the end, with mysticism.”

He began producing, in 1998, a series of paintings on paper called The Mask and then painted more ambitious works collected in the series Who is You — The Mask. For Granato, masks are visual notes of faces that were part of his imagination. The painting of these masks worked like gateway to a world of his childhood and youth.
His family history corroborates his mixed origin: “From a very humble family on the mother’s side and a middle class family on the part of his father, a dentist of Sicilian descent, Granato had maternal artisan uncles and a sweet-smelling mother. Of mixed race, black and indigenous origin, and with a strong creative spirit, Mrs. Rosinha made art with her hands. In addition to candies, she sewed, embroidered, painted dishes and even gave birth. Her expansive form of communication intrinsically linked her to her youngest son, Ivald.” Alice’s testimony about her grandmother reveals her father’s indigenous and Afro-Brazilian roots and suggests that Granato possibly inherited his mother’s creative talent.

The city where Campos dos Goytacazes was born, in the north of Rio de Janeiro, refers to the ethnic group that once inhabited the banks of the Paraíba do Sul River that crosses the region. Before the economic boom resulting from the extraction of oil on its coast, the municipality of Campos was producing sugar and moonshine and raising cattle its support since colonial times. From that time, a rich folklore has survived, with the Bois Dotadinhos, dancing characters considered to be Samba Boes, which come out during carnival, and the festival of Mana-Chica do Caboio, which brings together elements of indigenous, Portuguese and African cultures in dances similar to the gang.
These popular demonstrations certainly remained in his imagination and served as inspiration for the faces that Granato began to paint in 1998. This set includes clownish figures that seem to have come out of the children’s universe.
After that first incursion into the past, Granato turned to African ancestry, an underlying force in Brazilian culture, which is increasingly recognized today. Na series whose title asks Who Are You, we see a succession of strange faces emerge from a dark background. With the collaboration of the Ivald Granato Collection, we were able to confirm that these paintings are inspired by tribal masks, some of them reproduced in the book African Masks from the Barbier-Mueller Geneva collection, published in 1998, found in the artist’s library.
To make this counterpoint, we borrowed some copies from Africa, carefully preserved in the collections of Christian-Jack Heymès and the Mastrobuono family formed during the 1960s and 1970s.

The strength of African masks is undeniable. As Picasso realized, black art is impressive and not only because it confronts naturalistic aesthetics, but because it has a purpose in its origin
magic; he saw masks as communication tools. From his visit to the old Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum in Paris, he remembered the disgusting smell that those accumulated pieces gave off and their frightening appearance. Despite the discomfort, he was attracted by the strangeness they caused. “The masks weren’t like any other sculptures. Not at all. They were magical things. […]. The black pieces were intercesseurs; I have since learned this word in French. They were against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits. I looked at those fetishes all the time. I finally understood: I am also against everything. […] I understood why I was a painter. All alone, in that creepy museum, with masks, red-skinned dolls, dusty mannequins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have occurred to me just that day, but never because of the shapes: because it was my first exorcism painting. Yes, absolutely!”
In the case of Granato, the attraction to this iconography, so foreign to Western codes, came from the search for its cultural roots and the desire to affirm its identity. As with Picasso, it wasn’t the formal values that initially seduced him, but the recognition of the symbolic power of the masks.
Klintowitz described his attitude toward them as one of “extreme reverence”. It is worth remembering that, traditionally, masks are not appreciated as purely aesthetic objects, they perform functions: they are used in ritualistic contexts aimed at healing, initiation ceremonies, funerals, festivals, rites
propitiators of harvest and war. On these occasions, placed on the faces or on the top of the heads of certain members of the community, they incorporate religious entities. The masked – wearing natural fiber costumes and wearing props made of fur, horns, feathers, shells, etc. – dance and practice symbolic gestures according to certain conventions. These performances, with all the caveats, resonate with Ivald Granato’s performance practices, activities that spanned his entire career and made him recognized.

Maria Alice Milliet
Curator

São Paulo, February 2026