Jonathas De Andrade

(Variable dimensions) “Under the Same Sun: Jonathas de Andrade”
Jonathas de Andrade works with installation,
photography, and video to explore constructs of empathy, love
and urbanization, with particular emphasis on Brazil’s vibrant
but often overlooked northeast region. Using strategies that
shuffle fiction and reality, De Andrade collects and
catalogues images, texts, life stories and recomposes a
personal narrative of the past to traverse collective memory
and history. The artist’s practice mostly deals with everyday
life in Brazil as national identity, colonialism and slavery. The
artist builds his remarkable work through research and
investigation. In his work, affections that oscillate between nostalgia and eroticism, as well as historical and political criticism, are employed in addressing such themes as the world of labor and workers and the identity of the contemporary subject, almost always represented by the male body.
More than 100 workers in the streets of Recife were approached by Jonathas de Andrade in order to create Adrastus Collection’s most recent acquisition Suar a camisa (2014). The collection of 120 sweaty shirts -each traded personally by the artist via exchange, pair or donated from the workers-, were put on wooden mannequins and lined alluding to a sort of waiting line: an unemployment line, a line to enter a bus, or even a line of striking workers.
“The sun in Recife burns the skin and the stifling heat drains all one’s energy. It forces those who live in this coastal town in the northeast of Brazil to seek shelter in the shade and to protect themselves from weather that oscillates between splendor and cruelty, violence and warmth.”¹ With Suar a Camisa (2014), the unwashed sweaty shirts of each worker evoke a latent reality of social inequality in this region and confer visibility to the numerous employees subject to economic disparity. The installation Suar a Camisa (2014) was shown for the first time at the exhibition Museu de Homem do Nordeste, at MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio), where Jonathas showed the largest set of the series of the same name he has been developing since 2013.
¹
1 Marti, Silas. “In Focus: Jonathas de Andrade.” Frieze. N.p., 1 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 May 2017. <https://frieze.com/article/focus- jonathas-de-andrade>.