Drawing and eschatology: Flávio de Carvalho, Artur Barrio and Carmela Gross

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the relationships that drawing and eschatology weave in the production of Brazilian artists from different historical contexts up to the present, outlining a genealogy that is still early and incomplete. It seeks to reflect and identify, from the works presented, the eschatological gestures — in relation to the meanings of mythical-religious eschatologies (Eliade, 1972) — and the grotesque traits — described in the theory of grotesque realism (Bakhtin, 1987), which invite imaginations to reinvent the world in a time marked by environmental, political and social crises; wars; exterminations and cataclysms. Drawing, at this juncture, becomes a blind action (Derrida, 2010), which does not project, but reveals, operating from the obscurity of the present captured in visual works, traits that question the future. It is concluded that the sense of eschatological finitude rekindles in individual and collective imaginations the end as the possibility of a new beginning and another life through the work of artists.