Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator"—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Rafael França.Rafael França was a Brazilian engraver, art critic and video artist whose videographic work, in particular, is recognized as some of the most preeminent Brazilian digital art. França’s greatest asset was his willingness to experiment and redefine the language of media. His videos turned the techniques of cinema and narrative inside out by abusing and disrupting plot structure, asynchronous use of sound and image, and cutting-edge display formats that would break up the visual experience between several screens, predicting the evolution of the distributed media culture we now experience today.But França wasn’t interested in indulging or fetishizing technology. His works were firmly rooted in formal consideration and innovation, and exhibited a sensitivity to and awareness of art history and criticism. This thoughtful approach is what distinguished his work and gave it credence, indoctrinating projects like Polígulos Regulares" (Regular Polygons), a piece from 1981 that transmits images to a geometric TV circuit composed of 18 televisions arranged in the shape of a polygon, into the canon of Brazilian digital art. Despite an apparent anachronism—video art, after all, began more than 20 years before—França was still considered a pioneer. He was the first Brazilian artist to begin a serious dialogue with tradition, while at the same time searching for ways to achieve a novel approach.The video art historian and critic Arlindo Machado once wrote, “In Brazil, the entire first generation of video makers consisted of names [who were], in general, already established in the art world or in the process of consecration (…). Video was born, however, and integrated with the arts expansion project as [one] means among others, but the artist’s creative process was never seen with uniqueness… No one was exploring the possibilities of video’s peculiar language, except in a few isolated cases, sometimes even accidentally. This situation would only be changed a little later, when a new generation, more committed to exploring the rhetorical devices of the electronic image, finally entered the scene. That would then become Rafael França’s generation.”França, then, was the first Brazilian artist to treat video as a distinct new medium that required exploration of its unique formal and aesthetic qualities. By following in the footsteps of the pioneers of American video art, França put himself on display, trying to find a semantic universe that could accommodate his experience of life and art: cuts, inversions, breaks in the narrative, suicidal experiences, homosexuality, AIDS and the refusal of the values of the market. Still, according to Arlindo Machado, “França’s ideas about the expressive potential of video contaminated not only his own work, but also many of his contemporaries of the independent video generation. One might even say that several generations of Brazilian video artists have evolved thanks to his ideas and ways opened by him.”França died of AIDS in 1991 and explicitly addressed the experience by announcing his death in “Prelúdio de uma Morte Anunciada” (Prelude to an Announced Death), a video of the same year that shows the artist and his partner in a loving embrace while a list of friends killed by the disease scrolls over them. It was to be his final and lasting legacy.Learn more about França’s path in the video below, a trailer for the documentary Rafael França: Obra como testamento (Brasil, 2001), produced by Videobrasil Cultural Association.
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