Since the 1980s, Sérgio Sister has been pushing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, experimenting with various chromatic combinations and ways of applying paint on canvas, boxes or wooden slats. However, his practice in the 1960s was largely figurative, drawing on elements of pop art, such as the appropriation of mass culture images and the use of saturated colors and collage. Unlike pop art from the USA, Sister and other Brazilian artists appropriated elements from mass communication as a critical response to the escalating threats posed by the civil-military dictatorship that gripped the country from 1964 to 1985. In this particular painting, the figures are anthropomorphic, yet their bodies are deliberately distorted, as seen in the figure on the right, which was produced with collage and sewing to evoke a fragmented body. Spray marks accentuate the ethereal aspect of the figure on the left, with iris-like shapes and cascading drops representing tears. The figure holds a newspaper affixed to the canvas, featuring a sensationalist news headline about the brutal murder of a woman. Hand-painted above is the neologism “jornalha”, a mocking amalgamation of the words “newspaper” [jornal] and “scoundrel” [canalha], as a critique of mass media. The collage of the headline, rendered in black and white and geometric letters, contrasts with the lysergic and multicolored aspect of the painting, whereas, as a whole, the work reiterates a central aspect of the historical and political context in which it was created: violence.
— Leandro Muniz, assistent curator, MASP, 2023
