Interview: Miguel and Vera Chaia tell why their art collection looks like a lighthouse

Miguel Chaia is a Sociologist, a teacher of Social Sciences at PUC-SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo), an editor and a prolific writer. He is also a collector of Contemporary Art who sits on the board of important museums and institutions in Brazil, such as the São Paulo Biennial Foundation and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Together with his wife Vera (who, among other things, is a teacher of Politics at PUC-SP), Miguel has been building one of the most interesting and comprehensive collections of Brazilian art, contemplating the majority of that country’s art production from 1970 onwards. The collection is under constant expansion and once an artwork joins the assemblage, it stays there. In September 2015, Miguel talked about the inception, present state and future plans of the collection with Conceptual Fine Arts.

 

Could you please talk about the beginning of the Vera and Miguel Chaia collection, in the 1970s? How did you start collecting?

 

Looking backwards, a combination of events allowed us to initiate an art collection. We were both students when I, Miguel, attended a course by Anatol Rosenfeld at the Escola de Cinema São Luis, in São Paulo. The course, which focused on Aesthetics with an emphasis on Fine Arts in the late 1960s, equipped me with a theoretical universe to visit museums and galleries. Vera, by her turn, would look up to teachers and pupils from Escola Brasil¹while she was studying Social Sciences in the beginning of the 1970s. Since we started dating while students, we were constantly exchanging opinions about art, which resulted in our increasing interest on the field. In those conversations we would mix Sociology with Cinema and Fine Arts in a pleasurable pace, which enabled us an intellectual development towards the Arts. After finishing our degrees and obtaining our first jobs in the university – I would also work with urban planning – we started to buy figurative prints by artists Marcelo Grasman and Octávio Araújo. Then, by artists whose style was grounded in abstraction, such as Maria Bonomi, Tomie Ohtake and Wesley Duke Lee. These firsts works were acquired rather spontaneously, as we wished to have at home artworks that expressed our strong interest in art.

 

When did all this happened?

 

This process happened between 1973 and 1976. At that time, we didn’t aimed to establish an art collection. Nor did it occurred to us to buy an artwork priced beyond our family income. It happened that, in 1976, at the inaugural exhibition of Galeria Grifo, in São Paulo, there was a 70 x 70 cm painting by Tomie Ohtake that was very similar to a lithography we had by her. It was an eerie yet delightful encounter – a painting made of bright red and a dense layer of black on top of it, which seemed to have been both born and perfected from ‘our litho’. I mentioned to Marilú and Dudu Santos, the gallery owners, that we had a similar print and that it would be beautiful to also have Tomie’s painting. But, as teachers, the price was too high. Marilú then said: ‘It is Tomie, let me talk to her and see what we can do’. Marilú immediately called the artist, and I overheard she emphasising that we were both teachers and that we were interested in acquiring the painting. She then hung up the phone and told us: ‘Tomie said that I can do whatever you want. She really admires the teachers’. We split the payment in several instalments – several indeed – and bought the painting. Something absolutely unexpected. It was great to have the work, and also to realise that we could have a piece we wished to live with on a daily basis.

 

What happened after this first significant acquisition?

 

Afterwards we bought a canvas by Maria Leontina, another by Luiz Paulo Baravelli… Still without the awareness of what constitutes a collection. I remember that, after meeting Baravelli during a quite pleasant lunch, he asked me: ‘How many artworks do you have at home? If you have more than ten, then its already a collection’. For the first time this question appeared to us. It was the end of the 1970s and, looking at the pieces hung in our walls, we noticed that we had over ten artworks. We had become collectors without the intention to do so; when we realised we had at home a fine group of works by artists we both admired and enjoyed. Thus the collection entered our lives without a designated plan, but we decided to take on this adventure, which became even more exciting due to the conditions of our academic professions.

 

Was your initial emphasis on painting?

 

As I mentioned previously, the beginning of the collection was unexpected. But gradually we realised that our interest was channeled mostly towards paintings. We got increasingly acquainted with the oeuvre of Tomie Ohtake and Maria Leontina, which led us to complement the collection with other works by these two artists, as if the collection demanded that a certain work should dialogue with a kin work. Until this day, we try to expand the group with pieces by artists who are already present in the collection. We avoid, as much as possible, to have just one or a couple of works by a certain artist. Consequently, the collection is formed by several works by a same artist. With the exception of Tomie and Leontina, Vera and I decided that we would acquire artworks by practitioners who were producing simultaneously to our time – both because they interested us profoundly, and because they had relatively affordable prices in relation to our income. We continued to follow Tomie, a constant passion, and sought for works by artists from the 1970s, such as Baravelli, José Resende, Cássio Michalany, Carmela Gross, Regina Silveira, Antonio Henrique Amaral and others. Our interest gradually headed towards objects and concepts, hence some of the artists previously mentioned. In this new direction, and with the passing of time, we also focused on artists who were contemporary to our day to day, that is, the generation from the 1980s.

 

Would it be correct affirming that the focus of the collection is to accompany the artistic production of the present time?

 

Yes. But, as I said, we always return to artists already included in the collection. Perhaps it is now clear that the focus of our collection is to accompany the contemporaneity, as it gathers artists who produce in the present, dialogue with their predecessors and embody the potentialities of the future in terms of language and experimentation. This is the focus of the collection. Following this logic, we subsequently turned our gaze to artists from the so called ’80’s Generation’², acquiring works by practitioners such as Karin Lambrecht, Leda Catunda, Leonilson, Mônica Nador, Dora Longo Bahia, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Monteiro, Arlindo Daibert, and Tunga (the latter slightly anterior to 1980). By its turn, the interest in these artists gave us clues about the meaning of photography, particularly the one that approaches the human figure, the body in the process of performance. Thus a new group has since joined the collection. Yet by its own turn, the discovery of photography shed some light towards the video, which is another relevant segment of the collection. It seems like the collection has developed its own will, something that is born from within: an artist demands another, a media demands another, a gender demands another… and so forth. Our collection is a web, a plot where group of works seek to establish a dialogue one with the other, at times with balance, at times with tension.

 

What about now?

 

Always keeping with the contemporary production, we now arrive to a significant part of the collection, composed by the generation that emerged around the beginning of the XXI Century, the Generation 2000 onwards. The interest on these young artists unfolds from the fascinating research they develop around language, as well as the challenges they impose to our perception and their freedom of moving between media. But also from an affective point of view, as an effort to look at the contemporary production through the perspective of the artist Lia Chaia, our daughter, and her colleagues. I believe that the focus of the collection has fully shifted towards young practitioners – several of them without a gallery, just starting their careers, but quite talented and full of potential. I suppose that the vocation of the collection is to try to understand – and to live with – the complex contemporaneity.

 

How you and Vera envision the future of the collection?

 

Fundamentally, the collection will continue to serve as a reference for us, in our effort to analyse and understand the contemporary production. That is, facing the novelties of the emerging art, the collection works as something steady, imprinting certain order in the multiple languages, proposals, categories and advances of the current art scenario. It becomes an important tool for us to dialogue with the uncertain, the unfamiliar and the little comprehensible. The artworks in the collection seem to posses some sort of autonomy, thus they attract, or show a path towards other more recent works. The collection aids us, in our endeavour, to be contemporary. I believe that art always demands efforts to comprehend, to get closer. And the collection works as a lighthouse, illuminating that which has potential, but seems a little hazy at the present moment.

In our desire to make the pieces we have assembled (by about 250 artists so far) increasingly public, we’ll keep on lending works for different exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. This year, we offered part of the collection to students from PUC-SP’s ‘Arte: História Critica e Curadoria‘ (Art: Critical History and Curatorship, in a free-translation) programme, so they can study some artists in the collection and develop projects aiming for an exhibition within the university space. In a medium-term scenario, we believe that the collection may become public, either having its own space in the university – we are proposing this partnership – or part of it will be offered to a contemporary art institution. The important thing is to keep it pulsating, allowing it to generate new experimentations and new sensibilities.

 

October 14, 2015