Brazilian art is very trendy at the moment; at least this is what the latest preferences of international curators seem to indicate. In the case of Rivane Neuenschwander the attention is well- deserved. Her work is delicate, often verging on immateriality, but above all it is of great beauty. Her selection of materials refers to traces of day-to-day life, the ordinary, the familiar and the ephemeral. These are poetically transposed into new and unexpected situations.

Rivane's current exhibition is demonstrative of a refined subtlety. Her interaction with the main gallery space is barely visible when seen from outside through the large glass panels. This site-specific piece consists of framing the gallery's floor by filling the gaps in the parquet with marble dust. Surprisingly, what emerges out of the banality of a floor pattern, is a powerful image which is unavoidably reminiscent of Lygia Clark's neoconcrete 'paintings' of the late 1950s. The area surrounding the artist's intervention with the space serves both as a narrow passage for the viewer to walk around the work, and a framing device: in true neoconcrete fashion the frame becomes a continuation of the work. However, as opposed to art transcending its own limits into 'real' space, Rivane places the worldly within the confines of art.

Her other work in the show, which consists of geometric constructions using coconut soap bars, is characteristic of a process of appropriation of what is generally perceived as the most ordinary of materials. Usually these have domestic connotations; the soap bars, for instance, are those traditionally used in Brazil for the hand-washing of clothes. Rivane transforms them into aesthetic objects which deny the humble origins of their materials, making them appear to be made out of marble. Dust is also used to mark some of the borders between the soap bars, giving rise to a geometry which is perhaps also referential to neoconcretism.

Neoconcretism was a short lived movement in Rio de Janeiro during the late 1950s and early 60s, which until recently had been ignored by art history.
Although of constructivist lineage, it shifted the emphasis from formal compositional preoccupations to the viewers' perception of the art object. By doing so it developed a an approach which opened a whole range of innovative possibilities for art in Brazil during the1960s and 70s.
Rivane has exhibited in recent years world-wide, most notably at the New Museum in New York and the Sio Paulo Bienal in 1998. With such global exposure, it is interesting to note how this work is received outside of Brazil. The visitor at her current London exhibition will perhaps remark on how serene the work is, how it differs from contemporary British or North American art. S/he may possibly identify Rivane's work with previous international movements in recent art history. Arising from these perceptions are notions of difference and otherness.

Apparently antagonistic views pertaining to local or universal precepts occur throughout Brazilian cultural history. A history marked by a creative process obliged to deal with its own identity in the face of provincialism and cultural dependency.
On the one hand, Rivane and her contemporaries - particularly in terms of their references to the neoconcrete movement - demonstrate a maturity in Brazilian contemporary art whereby outside influences are no longer essential; a quasi-autonomous development with a local historical coherence. On the other hand, the cultural hegemony of the West (the term is obviously inadequate) remains firmly in place. Young Brazilian artists now operate on a global level, often being better informed of trends in Europe and North America than those in their own country.
There is an element of truth in both these claims, yet they seem mutually antagonistic. Brazil has a track record of creating imaginative solutions out of apparently inescapable dilemmas. Already in the 1920s, the poet Oswald de Andrade called for a cannibalisation of the 'universal heritage', digesting it through local concerns. The 'Manifesto Antropofagico' was the theme of last year's 'Bienal de Sio Paulo'. Rivane's presence at this event is indicative of the relationship which her work has with the Oswaidian tradition.

Rivane's work may pay homage to the neoconcretism of Lygia Clark and Hofio Oiticica, yet the nature of its exposure is entirely different from that of Brazilian art in the 1950s and 60s. Although intelligently appropriating the inheritance left by the experimentation of that period, Rivane positions herself entirely within contemporaneity.

Michael Asbury