Marcos Chaves, history as hope[lessness] (Paulo Herkenhoff)
The immediate historiography, the blunt criticism of the present, the belief in the future of the changes that are expected to occur already move art around what happened since January 1, 2019. On the mast of the Rio Art Museum building (MAR) was raised a green and pink flag, the colors of the flag of the Mangueira samba school, which has on one side the words “It will pass” and, on the other, a threatening question mark. Vai passar [It will pass] (2019), Marcos Chaves’s flag is ambivalent, for those who are confident in a better future, less entropic than the present, it is a statement: It will pass. Period. For skeptics, it is pure doubt: will evil “pass?”. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh at dawn” (Psalm 30, verse 6) – is
Biblical and became a proverb in the Portuguese language: “There is no evil that always lasts, nor good which does not end.”
Marcos Chaves’ flag evokes optimistic and reticently the lyrics by Chico Buarque de Hollanda: “In this avenue a popular samba will pass.” and the memory of his lived time. The composer wrote for his time a song that is updated at any time: “In an unfortunate time / A page of our history / Faded memory passage / Of our new generations / Sleeping / Our motherland
so distracted / Not realizing it was subtracted / In dark transactions”.
Marcos Chaves is a chronicler of everyday life in Rio de Janeiro, with a look at his cultural landscape, the junction between nature and man’s work, the cultural ways of living urban kindness, its pains and the solutions of the homeless, in the precarious house of the man of the naked life. The artist is a true Carioca because he is loving and critical of the charms and social ills of
the beloved city.
Paulo Herkenhoff