Vera Chaves Barcellos is a crucial figure in Brazilian contemporary art, with a long journey of experimentation and exploration of the limits of the photographic language and reproducible image. One of the most paradigmatic works of her career is the series Epidermic Scapes, developed between 1977 and 1982 – a period in which the artist from Rio Grande do Sul was a member of the Nervo Óptico [Optic Nerve] group (1976-78), an informal meeting of artists interested in the exploration of the photographic language in a critical and ironic way.

In 1975, Barcellos received a scholarship from the British Council to research engraving and photography at Croydon College in London. This experience was central to the development of her work, in which, from then on, the photographic image became its main means of expression. The potential of this media for reproduction and manipulation offered the artist a tool to investigate the nature of the images and expand her creative possibilities.

In Epidermic Scapes, Barcellos transforms the human body into a field for artistic experimentation. She applies black paint to her own skin and to that of other people, and after transfering the ink to paper, she then photographs and enlarges these fragments, revealing an almost abstract image of the body. In the first works of the series, Barcellos used a special paper with a silver background from Eastern Europe, giving the photographs a metallic effect that obscures their realistic character and brings them closer to technical and scientific images. By printing the details of a person’s skin, this silver background creates a sense of depth and scale that makes the body look like a landscape.

Barcellos gave the series a provocative title, unable to resist the play on words in which the skin takes the place of topography. For the artist, the epidermic landscapes relate to what is on the surface. She is not interested in issues of intimacy and subjectivity, in symbols or psychological projections; what matters is to investigate a new way of looking at and documenting the infinite variety of the human body, its materiality, its marks and potential views.

The work represents a turning point in the exploration of identity and corporeality in art, expanding the definition of landscape to include human skin as a territory, a topography and a universe in itself. Epidermic Scapes can be compared to the work of Hudinilson Jr., especially his series Exercício de me ver [Self-Seeing Exercise, 1980-84]. Hudinilson Jr. also explores corporeality, but his approach is through introspection and the self-image; photography and photocopies stimulate a reflection on identity and personal perception, based on autoeroticism. In contrast, Barcellos’ work focuses on the transformation of the body as an intimate, biographical object into a geographical, universal terrain, dissolving the border between the introspection of the self and the extroversion of the cosmos.

These photographs offer us a new perspective on the relationship between the body and the environment. The skin, such an intimate and individual element, transforms into a vast relief, like an aerial view taken from a great distance. Just as photographs of the Earth taken from space can appear to be of skin and microscopic structures, the prints of the skin cropped and enlarged, without reference to the human scale, assume a topographic quality, in which the contours of the hydrosphere, the biosphere and the lithosphere are imagined. In the transition from the personal to the cosmic scale, the dermis reveals patterns and textures that can be associated with the surface of the planet, evoking a corresponding sense of greatness. This ambivalence challenges the perception of the body as an intimate space and invites the viewer to consider, from the perspective of skin itself, the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the personal and the universal, the specific and the infinite. ///

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O estranho desaparecimento de Vera Chaves Barcellos [The strange disappearance of Vera Chaves Barcellos] (Fundação Iberê, 2023)

Vera Chaves Barcellos: Obras incompletas [Vera Chaves Barcellos: Incomplete works], by François Soulages (Zouk, 2009)

Vera Chaves Barcellos (Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, 1938) is an artist, designer and teacher. She exhibited her work at the 37th Venice Biennale and the 14th São Paulo Biennial in 1976, and at the 3rd São Paulo Salon of Contemporary Art (1985). She founded the Nervo Óptico group (1976-1978) and the Obra Aberta gallery (1999-2002).

Fernanda Pitta (Curitiba, Paraná, 1973) is a curator and researcher. She is a professor at Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP). She curated the exhibitions Trabalho de artista: imagem e autoimagem (1826-1929) [Artist’s Work: Image and Self-Image (1826-1929)] (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2018) and Eleonore Koch: espaço aberto [Eleonore Koch: Open Space] (Street Art Museum of São Paulo, MAR, 2022), among others.