Some May Work As Symbols review – this raucous Brazilian art extravaganza can stop you in your tracks
Adrian Searle, The Guardian
March 2024
Wild sambas and strict abstractions, vibrating lines and arrangements of eye-popping triangles. Weddings in church and a walk in the park. The rational and the religious, the grid and the carnival collide in Some May Work As Symbols at Raven Row in London. The exhibition shuttles between Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador in the state of Bahia, between conflicting ways of looking and thinking and being in the world.
Subtitled Art Made in Brazil 1950s-70s, the exhibition is both tantalising and wonderfully incoherent, jumping from one place and time to another, between the conflicting strains of the local and the international, and the different strands of Brazil’s culture. There’s pleasure in all the variety, the quiet moments and the humour, only some of which is intended. Based largely on the holdings of four Brazilian museum collections, the exhibition revels in its discord. […]