{"id":3831,"date":"2010-04-23T18:41:01","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T18:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ricolins.com\/?p=3831"},"modified":"2024-04-23T09:06:29","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T12:06:29","slug":"e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ricolins.com\/en\/e\/","title":{"rendered":"Entrevista a Andr\u00e9 Stolarski"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The name Graphic borderlines<\/em> suggests that your work takes place at some frontier. In a general sense, we could say it\u2019s the frontier of design. However, in your case, with the exception of some works that strive to expand the limits of the language<\/em>, this frontier is also the limit of design itself as a discipline<\/em>, where it touches on the plastic arts, music, architecture, photography and so on. If this limit exists and always has it\u2019s because it serves to define design in relation to what design is not. What attempts have you made to set these boundaries and how has your work sought to stretch or dissolve them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]I never ventured to set or draw a limit for what design is or is not. This was never a concern of mine, whether in terms of professional activity, expressive space or my own background. I was drawn to this universe of the image we call design by my interest in communication, on one hand, and visuality, on the other. Both always really attracted me and I discovered by chance that they came together in a discipline known as Visual Communication, taught at a school called ESDI\u00a0[Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial].<\/p>\n

So I enrolled at ESDI\u00a0and there was something called design, which I started working with. By the time I realized I liked design, it was too late. That\u2019s why this frontier has never been particularly clear or defined, but rather something highly flexible. I like to play around with the inter-contamination of these areas as an exercise. The creative process resides in the binomial liberty and limits. To have a well-defined limit is to have a wall to climb. It\u2019s an exercise in creative freedom, be it with shapes, typography or methodological processes, in which you can achieve an amplitude that\u2019s a little more fun.<\/p>\n

So I was never particularly true to design in the traditional, linear sense, despite always espousing communication as a way of meeting a very clear demand, which is a design attitude, though maybe by means not exclusive to the discipline.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Speak a bit about your career path, from ESDI\u00a0to today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]It was a long path. I graduated in 1979, but I started working before that. Since senior high, before I had any real professional perspective, I was already dealing with visual communication without knowing it. I joined esdi in 76, through Darwin Brand\u00e3o, my uncle, and Fl\u00e1vio de Aquino, who had just stepped down as director of the school. At the time, you had people like Zuenir Ventura, Aloisio Magalh\u00e3es and D\u00e9cio Pignatari on the staff at ESDI\u00a0. There was a very active circle and a very traditional circle, and it was great to experience these two very different and even antagonistic approaches at such an early stage in the professional formation of design in Brazil. It helped me develop a critical sense in relation to a professional practice not yet fully formatted. I didn\u2019t enroll at the school in order to secure a place on the market, because there was no market back then. I went there to meet an expressive need. My work was tightly bound up with illustration and the image. I was seventeen \u2013 youthful rebelliousness in full swing \u2013 and ESDI\u00a0was like a creative laboratory for me.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I felt much more affinity with the Bauhaus than with [The] Ulm [School] and I used to joke that I was much closer to my grandmother than to my mother. Bauhaus represented, and continues to represent, something more similar to what I do, working with borders. It had this root in borders, even historically speaking. At Bauhaus, design dialogued with art, fashion, dance, photography, architecture, poetry \u2013 it dialogued with society. Europe was in total effervescence, going through a moment of fantasy and cross-fertilizing ideas \u2013 architecture toyed with dance, dance played with photography, photography dabbled in poetry\u2026 it was an incredible time.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

And after ESDI\u00a0?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]After graduation I went to France, where I spent six years working with illustration and design. I had left Brazil with solid conceptual and political baggage, considering the reality of a country under dictatorship. In the opposition press, the image made good use of ambiguity; there was content, reflection and a non-decorative power of articulation. In France, I worked for a lot of newspapers, publishers, exhibitions; I had contact with various groups of active and important designers who I\u2019m still in touch with today.<\/p>\n

In the beginning, my main interest was in studying. I wanted to go to Barcelona, London, Milan, but I ended up staying in Paris. Then I began to feel it was important to invest in other directions, work a little more with photography. I had the opportunity to go to London because of an exhibition at the Georges Pompidou [Centre] on Alice in Wonderland. That was when I got to know the Royal\u00a0College of Art and saw that I could go back to school after a good spell of professional work. I won a scholarship and spent two years there, which was really important. At the time, the head of the design department was Gert Dumbar, a very interesting Dutch designer with strong iconoclastic, provocative and imagetic leanings I really identified with. He was very welcoming and said: \u201cCome join us, do whatever you feel like here\u201d.<\/p>\n

I started doing animated film, holographics and computer graphics, which was only emerging then. To an extent, I set my own curriculum. I did what interested me. Those two years were a deeper and more mature immersion in the creative and conceptual arena \u2013 it reinforced my belief that there can be no good results without concepts and processes. Spontaneous generation and chance can help, but they\u2019re not enough in themselves.<\/p>\n

When I left, I was invited to work with Gert in Holland. But I was also curious about New York, where I\u2019d been on vacation and had some brief contact with people who would later become really important to me, like Nigel Holmes, the art director at Time Magazine, and Steven Heller from the New York Times Book Review. Both Steven and Nigel gave me work straight away. I also met Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser, who were very receptive as well. So I thought: there\u2019s a place to explore here that might bring something to my work \u2013 a relationship with the market. There is room for reflection in the market. There\u2019s no need for that old-style view of it, as an enemy of the profession \u2013 which was a very 68-ish notion \u2013 work as combat. The challenge was to break into the cultural industry. As I\u2019ve always been motivated by challenges, I took this one on too \u2013 just parachute straight into New York, but with the same grit as I\u2019d tackled Paris. I started looking people up, making contacts, and was invited to join CBS Records, one of the biggest recording companies in the usa at the time, as art director. This was great, because I started to see how things worked on the other side of the table. At the same time I was also working as a freelancer for other companies, like MTV and other record labels. As I was never on a formal contract I could keep my autonomy. This formal relationship with the market was perhaps another border to cross in my work.<\/p>\n

This first year and a half in New York was decisive in dispelling the stereotype that in the USA, because they place such value on specialization, there\u2019s no space for people who\u2019ve never been specialists, whether in style or approach. I was never loyal to a creative process, I never said \u201cI do book covers, posters, trademarks and stuff for TV and will continue to do so for the rest of my life\u201d, but I thought that in the USA someone who does tomato illustration could make a fortune doing tomatoes,\u00a0but he\u2019ll never do persimmon. But I soon saw that it wasn\u2019t like that; that there were people looking for a more conceptual kind of work, a more transversal way of looking at things, something messier, less disciplined \u2013 maybe a little more European.<\/p>\n

I had a slightly Brazilian way of looking at things \u2013 not in the stereotypical sense, because I\u2019d always made a point of not being a Brazilian who uses national clich\u00e9s or stereotypes. I found affinities with stuff done in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, without needing to do macaws or pineapples \u2013 though no less Brazilian for that \u2013 or having to imitate the international style.<\/p>\n

I had some really strong interlocutors, like Jeff Keyton, an important art director at MTV, which was on the rise at the time. I also worked for VH1 and for the children\u2019s channel Nickelodeon. I did some magazine work with Paula Scher, who had just left CBS to open a small studio with another designer before going to Pentagram. There were some really interesting pockets in New York that I started to work with. I did a lot of stuff at the same time and realized that specialization wasn\u2019t important, that is, I saw that it didn\u2019t reside in a style, but in a creative attitude; not in the finished product, but in the work itself, the way you respond to a demand. Maybe that was another frontier: to look at the work as a response rather than as an end product. The process is much more interesting than the result. It\u2019s in the process that things become more consistent.<\/p>\n

When I left CBS I continued with my studio for some time. It was a small structure, but very flexible, and I still keep it today. I worked with lots of people from various different areas and a few years later became an agent illustrator for Push Pin and designer for id+A, as well as keeping an image bank with the Japanese firm Photonika. So I created working relationships with clients I would never have landed alone in the US or abroad. I started to discover multimedia too, digital media, the first steps toward interactivity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then my life took another turn: I received an invitation to return to Brazil, which I accepted for personal reasons and because I wanted to become involved with a market I knew nothing about here: advertising. I came back and soon felt that the scope was very limited in a market essentially built around the media. Creative work had no effective value and profits were sapped by communication costs. So I watched my hope of doing conceptual work in design go up in smoke. This has changed a little now, fruit of a repositioning in communications worldwide. You don\u2019t have that huge monolithic market with its massive public anymore; everything\u2019s segmented today. The content is worth more now, the communication structures need to rearticulate and design is at the core of this question.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/span><\/p>\n

You say that what interests you is not design as an end, but as a process, and that, despite your search for authorial work, the market presents opportunities for interesting communication processes. With that in mind, I\u2019d like you to talk about three of your works in particular: the graphic project for the German magazine Kultur Revolution<\/em>, a combative and probing cultural magazine; your covers and illustrations for Bravo<\/em>! magazine, another cultural publication, but one with market insertion; and your covers for Newsweek, which functions at the very nerve centre of North-American capitalism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Kultur Revolution has an academic readership. It\u2019s my longest-standing collaboration. I\u2019ve been working for them for 27 years, always with the same tone. The first covers are cult now, but at the time they were just something different made for a leftist magazine. The readership was always very clearly defined. And yet, all the other German academic publications back then followed the Germanic school of design, which was my background too: Helvetica fonts in lowercase and left alignment, etc. You had to do something different to get noticed. The target public had a visual culture and was able to understand and articulate images, but the themes were totally arid and I was extremely badly-paid for making those covers. It had disaster written all over it.<\/p>\n

The only thing for it was to try to use the space to have fun and produce something that could reach the public in an intelligent way; that would allow me to experiment with visual language and send out oblique and unexpected messages. If it hadn\u2019t been for that, it wouldn\u2019t have gone beyond the first cover. Imagine a briefing given by a German academic. It was a summary. I could never follow those briefings literally. A magazine should have a number of cover designers, but I was the only one. I had to produce various covers and renew the publication with each issue, with different themes, which I had to follow. I used to borrow fonts from German constructivism, I drew inspiration from tango steps in order to talk about the Left or from a collage by Bayer to talk about the presence of Turkish immigrants in Germany. I experimented graphically, but the covers were warmly accepted because the readership was prepared for that sort of thing. In that sense, the communication was very clear. All that resulted in a long-term creative collaboration and a solid friendship.<\/p>\n

IThe same held for Bravo!. The difference between them is that the idea behind Bravo! was to work in the cultural area by providing services, and it consolidated its position that way. I started working with Bravo! from the first issue, at a time when it positioned itself as something very different on the market.\u00a0I collaborated on all the issues, either with an inside cover or some such thing, but I was never worried \u2013 or paranoid \u2013 about having a recognizable style, though I saw that my work was recognized anyway, without having a hallmark as such, so it was a recognition that came from some other form of expression. This allowed me to use collage to make a cover one day and photography the next, and so on. This gave me a wide circulation and I could maintain the same attitude I had on Kultur Revolution and Newsweek. The difference is that Newsweek was produced for the market, Kultur Revolution was geared toward academia, while Bravo! filled a market niche for services and culture on the Rio-S\u00e3o Paulo circuit.<\/p>\n

Newsweek was in accordance with the global market in all its aspects: production, industry, readership and preparation. However, my relationship with the magazine was not particularly different in terms of creation, delivery, process, deadline, the need for communication and results. One particularity of Newsweek is that, given its enormous system of industrial production, the magazine has an art director for each section \u2013 three directors just for the cover. There were four editions: the domestic, Latin-American, European and Asian. Two or three covers with alternative themes were created for each edition per week, because one theme could rise or fall depending on the week\u2019s events \u2013 not to mention the emergency covers in case something came up at the last minute. It\u2019s a huge volume at a breakneck production pace: the contents are closed on Tuesday to have the magazine ready for Friday.<\/p>\n

Even so, I had a very good relationship with the magazine. No-one ever called me up saying \u201cI want you to make a cover like this or like that\u201d, instead it was \u201cI have a problem and I don\u2019t know how to solve it\u201d. So I\u2019d come up with an idea that could become a drawing, a photo or a collage. The end result was always a process ironed out with the magazine. So I signed some covers as illustrator, others as designer and others as art director. Some were never used, or were used much later on. Some came out on the Asian market but not in Europe, others featured in Latin America, but not on the US edition, while others were run everywhere. Producing collages was very complicated, because a whole army of lawyers had to be mobilized to check if there was some chance the owner of an eye or fingertip might recognize his eye or fingertip and sue the magazine for image rights. The industrial production behind it all was insane.<\/p>\n

The form and structure of production varies a lot from magazine to magazine, but the solution, the process and the demand, whether it was in conversation with the editor of Kultur Revolution, in the ideas I sent to Bravo! or in the work I did for Newsweek, were always quite similar from the creative point of view.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Let me pick up on your mentioning collage and indiscipline to speak a little more precisely about your work. When you say you felt closer to Bauhaus than to the Ulm School, you also declared your affinity with the 20th-century vanguards. One of the fundamental frontiers in your work lies in the visual arts, more precisely in Surrealism and Dadaism. The idea of indiscipline is common to both. In the case of Surrealism, it\u2019s in plumbing the unconscious, in other words, that which can\u2019t be disciplined. In Dadaism, it\u2019s the iconoclastic questioning of the statute of art. Another procedure common to both is collage. What importance do you give to collage and indiscipline in contemporary design? What scantly explored but powerful resonances can be incorporated into the field to expand its frontiers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]To speak of the image is to speak of ambiguity. Otherwise you lose a major quality of the image. It\u2019s like talking of cooking without mentioning taste or of sensuality without mentioning smell. Prior to understanding the importance of Surrealism or Dadaism as artistic schools in art historiography, and before determining what was one and what was the other, what always interested me was the question of ambiguity in the image that lies at both their roots.<\/p>\n

Friction generates energy. This is one of the first laws of fhysics and I think it holds for all types of communication. This is also a basic maxim in our area of work. Collage allows you to associate elements that do not necessarily combine, that remain dissociated. This association generates something that is far more powerful than the sum of the parts. This is evident from our capacity to expand our visual repertoire, through our commitment to pass it on. So, just as a writer has a commitment to preserve written language, we designers have a commitment to preserve visual culture. More than that, it is important that we feed this repertoire with the references that each of us has \u2013 and they are innumerable, they come to us down the most diverse paths, and we spend the whole day tripping over them.<\/p>\n

If we were a little less elitist \u2013 and the eye is not elitist, I mean, we don\u2019t choose what we see \u2013 though we do select what we like \u2013; we see what comes before us, the public sees what comes before it \u2013 we would see that everything is valid: Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters or a collage on a kid\u2019s bedroom wall, something painted in the street, a label, all of this is part of the visual universe that permeates us. We are immersed in this. Our job is to edit these images and articulate these signs in order to help create a certain repertoire, establish visual communication. It is on this plane that Surrealism and Dadaism mix, because we are talking about symbols and symbolic language is suggestive. When\u00a0you de-contextualize something the way these movements did, you shine a light on it. This work is fundamental.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s great that design is incorporating this. These vanguards are almost a hundred years old and this has long been absorbed by the great designers \u2013 in fact, great designers that were considered more illustrators than designers: Cassandre was a great illustrator; Paul Rand, a genius. They weren\u2019t part of a functionalist, Swiss or German school, but they had a dialogue with communication that bordered on art, illustration and advertising. In this sense, perhaps our vision of design is loosening up a little within the Brazilian perspective; maybe we\u2019re managing to talk a little more, shaking off a certain plaster cast. That is not to say that we are losing composure; quite the contrary, we are gaining authority in what we do, we\u2019re beginning to broaden our visual repertoire and incorporate elements that never used to be part of design and weren\u2019t welcome in it.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019d like you to talk about the relationship between the ideas of function<\/em>, which has always been a touchstone in modern design, functionalism<\/em>, and a third, which you seem to defend in your work: functionality<\/em>..<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Interesting \u2013 I\u2019ve never really thought about this. Functionality sounds more pragmatic to me, more disposable, perhaps more immediatist. The problem with the modern is that it sees itself as eternal. When you think of a perfect form, you self-invest in a very weighty character of eternity, as if perfection actually existed. It\u2019s an absurd contradiction in Modernism, because it ceases to be modern. Functionalism is very much connected with the modern while function is less bound to a school geared toward the essence of the object. Form, function and application are essential. Things have to have a function. Breathing has a function, air has a function, objects have to have functions.<\/p>\n

I never reflected much on the relationship between form and function, but I always doubted that it could resolve all the problems. When you start to see design outside the theory and in practice, as a communication tool, then it begins to exist in the day-to-day, when you\u2019re walking in the streets, bumping into the media and everything that goes with it. The elements are more imponderable, less perfect. The classical form\/function relationship presupposes a very perfect balance. It\u2019s like the design of an egg. Everything is perfectly resolved in there. Nobody can mess with it or it topples over. Perhaps functionality is more pragmatic, ephemeral and transitory and so perhaps closer to reality. It is less romantic, stripped of an air of purism, more down to earth.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

In mathematics, a function is the direct correspondence between elements. In the world of images, a peculiar type of function is established between images sold by the famous image banks and certain textual or ideological messages. In general, these images serve only to translate messages: they belong less to the field of images than to that of textuality, they are literal or functional illustrations. Your work seems to run counter to this type of relation, as the images are never what they seem. The poster for the 21st S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial and the cover for a special Brazil edition of Big<\/em> magazine are examples of that. In addition to generating an impact, these images also acquire permanence, as they remain a source of interest and questioning for those who see them. What is the role of this kind of image in the context of contemporary communication?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]In a word, inclusion. Communication processes are transforming more and more into information processes. That\u2019s a problem. Information is unilateral and unidirectional, while communication is a bidirectional and inclusive process that presupposes a reply. In this sense, things must never be complete. The perfect is the pits, perfection is absurd. When everything is totally resolved you\u2019re basically signing a certificate of stupidity for the reader, because there is no space left for him. Image banks are made like this. Their stock is so literal it excludes all brain power on the part of the viewer. Everything there is already digested and said. In other words, they are images with no function. That kind of image may work in an advert, on the cover of a company report or as a poster in a laboratory. You can change the image, but the function stays the same. You can sell a car, a bank account or a blood test with that same image. It makes no difference at all. There\u2019s no meaning there. It\u2019s just there as a compositional element.<\/p>\n

Even after such a brief period of mass communication or the so-called democratization of means of communication, we\u2019ve managed to destroy the millennial Chinese saying that \u201ca picture is worth a thousand words\u201d. Today, a single word is worth a thousand images. Images are absolutely bereft of all content. We are living a moment in which images need to be re-signified. We have non-stop access to images, but they are becoming emptier and emptier and increasingly more disconnected from their content. If you can\u2019t attribute content to an image, then it doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

When I use the image of a sliced fig on the cover of the Brazil special in Big magazine, I am not using a banana or a woman, but a fruit that, while not necessarily Brazilian, connotes the natural and the erotic when sliced open. When this cover caused a stir and led some newsstands in Los Angeles to refuse to display it because they said it was pornographic, I\u00a0know that I got my message across. There is a subliminal message in there over which I have no control. People saw something there of their own accord. I didn\u2019t say \u201cThis fig has a pornographic meaning\u201d. It\u2019s up to you to see what you want to see in it. That\u2019s where things get interesting, because you are dealing with the interpretive capacity of the viewer, with a public that is not passive, but actually made up of co-authors, of people included in the communication. Perhaps this is a border with music, because when you hear music you can dance. When you see an image and interact with it through a sense of strangeness, something similar is happening.<\/p>\n

Now, in the poster for the 21st S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial I used references to the history of art. In fact, it\u2019s a series, a triptych revisiting three male statues from different periods in the history of art. There\u2019s Rodin\u2019s The Thinker, which is the most classical, there\u2019s the Discus Thrower and then there\u2019s Mercury, and I made three posters. I mixed Rodin\u2019s The Thinker with a portrait of Magritte that I love, in which he\u2019s got his face covered with a chessboard. But it actually came out wrong and all the better for it, because I didn\u2019t have much money to produce it and called a photographer friend of mine, who also agreed to do something more experimental. The photos were taken at his house (there was no budget to pay for the photo, or to rent a studio, lighting, none of that). The model was another friend who had just had a plaster cast removed from his leg, so he couldn\u2019t stand there posing on one leg as a classical statue. So we said: \u201clet\u2019s invent some issue here, with the elements we\u2019ve got\u201d. To do that, we had to combine low lighting with photos taken in motor drive, which resulted in a certain asynchrony when the shot was taken, and the shutter was left open as the film ran: due to a photographic \u201cerror\u201d and the unusual movement of the image, the negative ended up too long. It was much better and more surprising than the photo that actually \u201ccame out right\u201d. These are accidents that end up being incorporated into the work.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Another piece that shows this kind of encounter is the poster for the film Bananas is my Business<\/em>, where part of Carmen Miranda\u2019s face is replaced with bananas. Instead of a literal reading of the title, we have two characteristics of your work: an iconoclastic persuasion and evident sense of humour related to this type of operation. What is the role of humour and irreverence in communication with the wider public?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]The poster is there to be pasted up. Everything has to be considered from the perspective of where it is going to exist. A magazine has to be thought of in a newsstand, a book in a bookstore, a TV show on a television set. This poster was made for the launch of the film\u00a0colain the USA, where posters are pasted onto boarding in the streets. It was a fictional documentary about a great Brazilian pop-culture legend, a very famous figure. It didn\u2019t make sense to produce a work on Carmen Miranda that showed Carmen Miranda. I had to find another way, because the Carmen Miranda to be pasted onto the wall for this film was new.<\/p>\n

I started from this principle: A different Carmen Miranda, pasted on a wall, a pop icon. I took a classic photo of the singer and whitened it out, printed it at five to ten percent so that it was barely visible, almost absent. I reduced Carmen to Carmen\u2019s mouth \u2013 because her smile and her voice are just as emblematic as the fruit on her head \u2013 and put some Andy Warhol bananas there for eyes, from his Velvet Underground cover, which is a huge icon for me, a synthesis of pop representations of the banana. (I tend to fix on certain things and use them on various occasions, in different works).<\/p>\n

This was a way of enlarging the poster, because when they were pasted in a row, the bananas joined up, creating a kind of dance. When you looked at them from a distance, what you saw wasn\u2019t a row of Carmen posters, but a long sequence of bananas and red mouths. Then you had to go up close to see, because the poster didn\u2019t look like a poster, but more like a painted wall or something. I used this device a lot on the cinema posters I made in New York.<\/p>\n

That was also the technique for the Pedro Almod\u00f3var film Labirynth of Passions. At the beginning of his career, Almod\u00f3var\u2019s aesthetic was very charged, very kitsch, while I, on the other hand, was discovering the movie posters from Indian cinema. This film, which was made with very little production, was not the Almod\u00f3var we know today. It came out after Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which brought him worldwide fame. I wanted to make a poster that had the feel of this film, with an aesthetic that went against the grain of the cinema we had then. I ended up producing a haphazard collage of jumbled elements. You couldn\u2019t quite tell if the posters had just been pasted up on the wall or if they were being torn town so others could be pasted over them. This relationship between the viewer and the poster is very important for its visualization.<\/p>\n

Another job I did for cinema in the US was a poster for a movie called Boca del Lobo, a political film from Peru on the armed struggle of the Sendero Luminoso against the Peruvian army \u2013 that endless fight in which one was winning one minute, then losing the next; in which each was viscerally bound to the other in trying to resolve a question intrinsic to Peruvian political history. I saw that the poster didn\u2019t have to be vertical, much less have a fixed position, but that it could somehow reflect this up one minute, down the next situation. As well, the political poster is only complete when it\u2019s on the wall outside. There\u2019s no point making a political poster and hanging it on the wall of your house. It\u2019s sometimes much harder to paste a political poster than it is to make one. Making them is even easy sometimes, compared with the guy who has to go paste it up and get truncheoned. That\u2019s why I thought it could be an opportunity to include the person who\u2019s going to do the pasting, leaving it unclear which side is up, giving no clear instructions. This was really good, because people hung them as they liked \u2013 sometimes upside down, sometimes the right way up, sometimes one upside down and the other right way up. There was no rule. I think this inclusion is fundamental. It\u2019s nice to be the final author, but if you can understand the final author as a conductor in the process, then things get much more interesting.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

You like to say that, contrary to what is normally said of art in the age of technical reproducibility, one of the most defining characteristics of design is not the demise of the original, but the possibility of transforming the scale and proportions of images. For you, more than any other field in culture or the visual arts, design is capable of altering the meaning<\/em> of images in this way. Why is this an attribute so particular to design?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]The change of scale was an opening I found to respond to the challenge posed by the curator Agnaldo Faria when we started thinking about the project for this exhibition. Our idea was to make an exhibition that worked with the frontier between design and the visual arts and that could explore the field of their dialogue and exchange. I saw that it was more interesting for me to focus on the work process than on the final product. My way of visually solving the riddle was to find a meeting point at which the visual and graphic arts both merge and differentiate.<\/p>\n

Scale and proportion strike me as very strong differentiating elements, because in addition to incorporating technical reproducibility, they also produce a displacement and re-contextualization that are specific to graphic design. The graphic arts can turn a postage stamp into a poster and a poster into a postage stamp, except that doing so entails more than simply distorting the scale, but also the function, the use, the context, the relationship with the surroundings, everything. A poster can\u2019t be glued to the corner of an envelope, and a stamp cannot be pasted to a wall.<\/p>\n

This aspect of displacement is more directly related to my work, in which plucking something from one context and inserting it into another is a key part. We spoke about collage, about mixing and jumbling references. The\u00a0poster for the film Boca del Lobo<\/em>, for example, needed a faded image. The original is the size of a cigarette pack, which was enlarged on a photocopier to a size that could be reproduced in poster format.<\/p>\n

In a way, the computer has given us control over the final size, but before the computer you had to avail of one physical space and turn it into another physical space: a piece of art ten centimetres long had to become a metre long. So there was already a displacement, but as the surface wasn\u2019t digital, numerical or scalable in b\u00e9zier curves, the flaws would be enlarged too. I always saw the flaws in enlargements as information, insofar as they carry the memory of the original. In a work process that deals with the symbolic, it is important to be able to identify how things are done. It\u2019s interesting to show the process, use the \u201ctrick\u201d but leave something visible, a clue for those who come after you, like a riddle to be solved. I\u2019ve always enjoyed discovering how things were done and I try to stimulate people to ask \u201chow the heck did he do that?\u201d.<\/p>\n

Analogical work leaves more space for that than digital work. It has this touch of imperfection and deals with limits in a much more concrete way. With digital technology the origin can be hidden because it doesn\u2019t really exist, it\u2019s numerical. The original exists in the analogical world, but not in the digital. What is an original digital file? It\u2019s the copies that confer originality upon a digital file.<\/p>\n

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There are some other aesthetic procedures we can identify in your work. First of all, the images rarely appear in isolation, and when they do, they are never what they seem. Secondly, the typography is rarely preserved or in harmony with the image. Finally, there\u2019s an energy generated by the friction between the superimpositions, transparencies, profiles, vibrations, static and accumulations, which are all done with evident care not to let the visual richness descend into visual confusion. I\u2019d like you to comment on these not only as aesthetic procedures but also as something valuable for those who understand design as a business, considering that cleanness \u2013 the antithesis of your work \u2013 has always been considered by many, as it still is today, to be an essential value in design.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]In answering that I\u2019m going to stray a little from dirtiness and the negative connotations the clean aesthetic has attributed to it and talk about two concepts that I developed and that formed the backbone of a visual language repositioning project. I was invited by Ricardo Guimar\u00e3es to come up with a language project that could align all the ethical attributes of Natura with its aesthetic expression. The company is known for its social responsibility, environmental concerns, etc., though these\u00a0were not visible in the product line and communication. They had a brand book, trademark and institutional communication architecture all in place, but they didn\u2019t have a rounded brand communication strategy. The identity [of the company] didn\u2019t function as a language. So we had to formulate a language capable of aligning advertising, photography, packaging, institutional material, internet, etc. To do this I started from two concepts: whiteness and profile. The result was a controlled naturalness, which we called \u201cartistic naturalness\u201d.<\/p>\n

To achieve this it was also necessary to change the way things were done. For example, there was no point in having a briefing with an advertising agency describing a photo and layout. It was essential to establish a different relationship between the photographer and the subject, to capture a real relationship between mother and child at the right time, make a kind of photographic documentary of a real, intimate and quality relationship. You had to challenge the photographer, because otherwise you\u2019d get the same-old photo \u2013 technically good, but impartial, distant, madeto- order. The only way I found to do this was to strip the photographer of his secret weapon, lighting, obliging him to work in uncontrolled light \u2013 total blinding white light. Exposing the photographer to a situation of risk, in which he has only limited technical control, demanded creative solutions, with more artistic involvement. If the \u201cwhite\u201d translated certain essential traits of Natura \u2013 corporate transparency, the purity and clarity of the cosmetics \u2013 it also showed the impurity, the dirt, the photo without delimitation, all the imperfection of the \u201creal woman\u201d, with wrinkles and what not. This aesthetic platform has a lot to do with a company\u2019s ethical platform. That was the challenge: for the photo to represent aesthetically an attribute of the company through the approach of the photographer.<\/p>\n

Another aspect of the photographic approach concerned the representation of reality. It wasn\u2019t enough to have a casted mother kissing a casted son. What we needed was a real mother kissing her real son with real involvement, with all the truth of that relationship. That takes a documental eye, believing that it is possible to achieve all the authorial force of a Pierre Verger in a picture for a bottle of perfume. That was the immense and insurmountable challenge, but we had to include that dramatic touch, which translated, in turn, into a profile. This was the second element capable of aesthetically defining the company within its worldview in any context. After all, if a 25 ml bottle of camamu perfume is worth what it\u2019s worth, it\u2019s because it contains the work of the picker, the whole production chain, the commitment of the company, etc. The value is not just the liquid that\u2019s in there, but the work of harvesting and everything else. It\u2019s an adumbration of a process that is much bigger than the milliliters in the flask. This visual concept work consolidated and gave rise to a brand language project that brought together from advertising agencies and photographers to the strategy of brand positioning for Mercosul, France, product lines, packaging, the lot. It took over a year of positioning work, workshops and alignments to get down to those concepts \u2013 \u201cwhiteness\u201d and \u201cprofile\u201d \u2013 within a branding strategy. However, all of this was the fruit of a visual concept drive that has a lot to do with the dirtiness you mentioned, because the imperfection was there to see in those cropped and dirty, though also white and pure photos. So I produced concepts and processes, but very little design in terms of the finished project.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

You have said on various occasions that \u201cdesign is more than just aggregate value\u201d. What do you mean by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Design can be more than, less than or just aggregate value. In a broader sense, design has aggregate value not only from the perspective of the market, consumption and use, but also the history behind something, its cultural meanings, symbolic content and form of production. These values, though aggregate, are not tangible, not subject to precise or objective measurement. We\u2019ve already spoken about repertoire-building. That\u2019s not just short-term aggregate value. The perception of aggregate value is closely connected with the short term, but it also has a contribution to make to the history of design, which is long-term. Design is not done just for the market. You have the market, culture, technology. It helps strike a balance among various things. When your work makes someone think something, it already surpasses the notion of aggregate value.<\/p>\n

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In your work, the typography rarely appears in all its typographical purity, but it\u2019s almost never calligraphic either, with the author\u2019s personal stamp.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Typography is still a fairly recent discovery for me. I never had the care, time or desire for the typographic area. It\u2019s been only ten, maybe fifteen years since typography really revealed itself to me. It was at the Royal College that I started to see it as something more than just a way of writing words. This came through two channels: Gert Dumbar, who worked with typography with great ease, humour and the deftness of a master, the freedom of someone who really knows what he\u2019s doing; and the other was Phil Baynes and David Ellis, classmates who were always putting fonts together, slogging away in the typography workshop with lead typeheads during the day and getting their feet wet with the first computers at night. Phil used to make a monthly typographic\u00a0postcard and distribute it among the class. He\u2019d spend the whole day in the typography workshop. His graduation project was a pair of huge candles made from typographer\u2019s wax, which burnt up their typography during the presentation. It was stimulating to be in touch with the experiments of the graphic vanguard \u2013 like the magazine The Face, mostly done in vegetal paper.<\/p>\n

Gert Dumbar used to do work that mixed printed type with photographed three dimensional letters and letters that were three-dimensional shadows. He did identity projects for companies of the caliber of the Dutch Motor Club, on which he worked with a 61.5\u00b0 grid just on a whim \u2013 and the company went along with it! There was a high degree of experimentation in countries where design managed to play about so seriously. That was when I started to realize that typography made sense from an expressive point of view. That said, I never wanted to delve deep into the history of typography because I always looked at it that way, as an element of visual expression and composition.<\/p>\n

For example, there was one time I did the packaging for an O Botic\u00e1rio perfume called Insensatez, where the name of the product is written upside-down on the bottle. The bottle is placed upside-down in a box with no name on it, just an opening through which you can read the name off the flask, but you only know it\u2019s in that position when you open the packaging. This word play between the perfume and its name is purely typographical.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Yes, but that purity has nothing to do with the typographical purity of the Swiss School.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Of course not, that would demand something of me that I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n

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The authorial character of your work leaves you open to being branded a mere graphic artist or illustrator. There are many graphic artists who are restricted to a field that is in fact smaller, not in the sense that what they produce can\u2019t be big or grand, but that they are limited to a much narrower universe than that encompassed by modern design. Many examples show that, though authorial, your work has the mastery of scale normally associated with, shall we say, major designers. I\u2019d like you to comment on that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]This smallness of the graphic artist is a market issue. Because the graphic artist doesn\u2019t have the support of marchands, a corporation or some wider market structure like you have in the fine arts, corporate design or advertising. It\u2019s a totally false smallness, because it\u2019s not connected with the quality of the work, but with its temporality. Graphic art exists in ephemeral printed media. The poster and magazine are things that don\u2019t last.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not some Mona Lisa, five centuries old, or a corporate image that\u2019s worth billions of dollars or that consumes rivers of money in dizzying media plans. My horizon has never been careerist. I never wanted to do something whatever the price and I don\u2019t want to turn my life into a ladder. Inclusive work is part of that: there are some things to which it makes more sense to say yes than no. From the creative point of view, I always had this restlessness and urge to dabble in new things, move through different areas and resolve matters in the most pragmatic manner, allying creativity and repertoire. That way I can travel all these paths in a less problematic fashion, with more confidence, fewer labels. And that is complicated because the market demands labels and I move within a more hybrid market. There are designers who consider me an ad-man, ad-men who think I\u2019m a illustrator, and so on\u2026 When I went to France they asked me where I was going to fit in, but when I left they still didn\u2019t know how to box me. It\u2019s interesting, because the market demands creative specialization, but it doesn\u2019t offer the conditions that make specialization feasible for creators. Besides, creation and specialization don\u2019t always sit at the same table. I\u2019ve always had the need to do and found pleasure in doing things I know how to do and if I do such varied things it\u2019s because I decided early on that I wanted to survive creatively in the market.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][rs_spacer height=”20px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

How do you immerse yourself in images without drowning?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

You swim.<\/p>\n

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* Andr\u00e9 Stolarski was\u00a0a graphic designer and a partner-director of Tecnopop<\/em>, where he developed projects in the editorial, exhibition and visual identity fields. He conceived and developed the book Alexandre Wollner and the formation of modern design in Brazil<\/em> and adapted for Portuguese the book Elements of typographic style<\/em>, by Robert Bringhurst, both published by Cosac Naify<\/em> in 2005.<\/p>\n

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