Teeth, soap and crystals. Reflections about the contingency in the poetics of the Brazilian artist Tunga

Abstract

This article’s objective consists in the analysis of the contingencies that permeate the creative process of the Brazilian visual artist Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão (1952-2016), internationally known as Tunga. The artist works with different materials and artistic languages, such as: photography, drawing, installations, performance art, painting, sculpture and video. This article will investigate specifically the way Tunga visually explores the thematises “time” and “body“ in some of his works, especially the artwork-book entitled An “Eye for an Eye” (2007). We understand that by studying the poetics of one of the most important Brazilian visual artist, we dialogue with the critical debate of the global contemporary art. As a theoretical basis, we highlight the contributions of Yuriko Saito (2017) about the “aesthetic of the familiar” thematic.