ByMadelynGrace

Hudinilson Júnior

I.

Hudinilson Júnior was born in 1957 in São Paulo, Brazil, coming of age in the military dictatorship which lasted from 1964 to 1985. He died in 2013 at the age of 57. All the history in between in something smaller than a nutshell for the sake of a bow: modernization of Brazil gifted the artist with the Xerox machine. The oppression under the country’s culture and politics forced the space for his experimentation with it. 

Hudinilson was captivated by the technology like a child recognizing himself in the mirror after seeing his reflection so many times before. He enlisted Xerox to create his own images for material of his own making to use like he had with so many magazine clippings and other various scraps. His oeuvre displays a clear mastery of collage. For someone so necessarily split, what else is there to do? 

The artist kept reference books filled past their brims with images, a “caderno de referência,” of which the gallery has displayed a few, flipped in half face-up under a glass table. These strategies holographed themselves into larger distillations of their idea, like the blown-up picture of an upper body and armpits stratified into 32 frames pinned to the wall. 

And I’m reminded of an old artist I met at the bar at Fanelli’s the other night, who evolved from realist watercolor paintings into small-scale modernist sculpture. There’s an image he shows me with a wire fence in front of a rotting car. He tells me he didn’t draw the frame of the fence, but instead painted the inside of every diamond until it reached the white outline of each space. 

So I wonder what the whole would be if its pieces were all in different places? Take a square out of a series. Look close at a tree and try to guess we’re in a forest. 

I’m reminded of Mike Kelley at MOMA, where I walked through with two children I didn’t know and pointed to all our favorite parts. 

“See how all the stuffed animals come together to make one? How even big things are made up of lots of tiny ones? How tiny things make up big ones?”

We circle each color until we get to the amorphous rainbow in the center. 

“The big pieces even come together to make a bigger one!”

The little girl mimics the animal she thinks the figure is. We play with our arms like a t-rex, facing this way and that way. We laugh. She stands still. She shrugs.

”Really, I think it’s just a wave.”

II.

Teased with several of Hudinilson’s books locked under plastic, viewers are allowed to flip through Sean Price’s books and writings laid out on big white tables in the accompanying show, which parlays with its partner both on accident and on purpose. 

Talking with the curator, I found the decision funny. He tells me the scrapbooks “weren’t meant to be artworks.” I think about intention. I wonder how much curation taints it. For the love of God enough with all of these artists statements and press releases with heads up however many assholes. 

The show aims to illustrate how the work “isn’t precious,” and it’s a statement only said. Rifling through sheets of printer paper with writing as sporadic as a Google Drive archive after edging to pages of hidden Frankensteins was throwing a bone I didn’t want. Isn’t some of the best art exactly where we don’t mean for it to be?

But then I looked at the wall of my bedroom, where a large piece of bare linen is pinned. On it are pieces of material memories taped all sporadic. So I took something small and put it into my diary. And I saw the decision of how to display the work differently. 

The work is like a diary because it is one. Who’s right is it to expose something like that?

Thinking of the work as body prints, I consider David Hammons. And maybe I think less about his body and more about what he made with it, though I endlessly wonder about the difference. 

I think about how much I’d like to see a show of Hundinilson Jr. at The Drawing Center, too. They are currently showing In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney, bits collected from the artist’s life, from the famed portraits to handwritten letters and sketchbooks. I went for a walkthrough with one of the show’s curators where I’m distracted by tears in the adjoining room reading the hands’ writing. 

I also can’t help but still think about Jack Whitten, whose residency at Xerox in Rochester was just two years before Hudinilson’s in São Paulo. Fascinated with the camera, Jack sometimes focused more on an environment than its subject. He did not craft with a mirror but what it illustrated with the surface held against his heart. These pieces depict stratus marks and constellations. A copy in a different hand. Though a projection is still a reflection. 

Narcissus, Narcissus, Narcissus: Say that three times fast in front of a mirror—for whom do we speak?

It could be easy to limit the work to an exhibition of gay Xerox art, only for those enraptured by hairy men. Except nothing stands alone. To think I’ve tied a thread through three uniquely Black men to talk about a Brazilian homosexual who copied his penis and pasted gay porn. 

III.

Because the work is like picking at an ingrown hair in a hand mirror and succeeding. Disgusted satisfaction: this is how I’d like to think my wax lady feels with a pair of tweezers in the bush between my legs. I can’t wait to see her tomorrow morning! Unlike the show. . .which closed before I got a pitch to bite. And the scrapbooks, which never turned a page under those tables. 

There is a strange reversal of fetishization in keeping them so secret. The depiction of the other becomes taboo, not the ostrich skin of his ballsack or the pubic hair around a soft phallus. But that’s the thing: Once it’s captured in an image, the body is no longer itself. Roland Barthes talks about the death inside of a photograph, a meditation I won’t try to relay. There’s a picture of him pasted on one of Hudinilson’s pages I can only ever look at online. 

Despite and because of its limitations, like anything, the show asks an interesting question if you let it. What is more intimate: Our bodies, what our eyes see, or what our hands make? 

“These visual archives are less finished works than open-ended annotations that offer a glimpse into a rich, informal cosmology.” Sure, he spoke in images, but how can I understand his language if you don’t let me experience it? God forbid, I just want to see the handwriting.