lovesouthernsocial.com

A plastic artist based in Brazil, Frans Krajcberg showed with his works that there were still reasons to shout in the name of nature

Man's first form of language was the “cry of nature”. According to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, men used sounds to call for help in danger or to relieve themselves from violent pain. Frans Krajcberg's cry (1921 - 2017) was similar to this primitive language, in that it denounced man's violence against nature and exposed the pain of devastated forests. The plastic artist, awarded at the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Bienal and the Salão de Arte Moderna, among others, was very important in the panorama of Brazilian art and developed a powerful activism work with his works in painting, sculpture and photography.

• Art and the environment: major aspects and questioning powers

Frans Krajcberg

Born in Kozienice, Poland, in 1921, the artist lost his entire family to the holocaust. In the four years he spent in the war, Frans Krajcberg faced the darkest face of human beings, violence. After all this barbarity, the plastic artist found refuge in the beauty of nature's forms. He settled in Brazil, where he arrived in 1948.

In the 1960s, Krajcberg lived in the interior of Minas Gerais, in a cave in the mining region of Itabirito - there he extracted the pigments from his paints. But it was on visiting southern Bahia, more precisely Nova Viçosa, at the invitation of his friend and architect Zanine Caldas, that the artist found his refuge for life. “I thought: 'My God, how much wealth it has, movement it has, that art ignores. I stay here”, said Frans Krajcberg in the documentary “The scream of nature”, produced by TV Brasil.

Frans Krajcberg spent his last years in Nova Viçosa, where he maintained his studio at Sítio Natura, surrounded by the only remaining portion of Atlantic Forest in the region. He died in Rio de Janeiro, in 2017, leaving a huge amount of works focused on the relationship between art and the environment.

Frans Krajcberg's scream

In a world where individualism and indifference make everyday life cold and violent, Frans Krajcberg's cry is still and increasingly necessary. He fought and shouted against what he called the barbarism of man against man and humanity against nature. “This is my life, to scream louder and louder against this barbarism that man practices”, he revealed. He made his art a cry of revolt by transforming charred trunks and branches into sculptures. "I want my works to be a reflection of the burnings. That's why I use the same colors: red and black, fire and death."

Photo: Cael Carvalho

Trunks and roots charred by fires that cut down dense green areas to turn them into pasture were the material of Frans Krajcberg's works. He collected what the fire left behind and transformed the materials so that they could cry for help in the name of the Amazon. “I try to express myself with this broken, murdered material, all this to show: look, yesterday it was a beautiful tree, today it is a burnt stick”, he said. He also recorded photos of forests and had thousands of photos of wildfires and the destruction of nature.

The plastic artist denounced the burnings in Paraná, the exploitation of minerals in Minas Gerais and deforestation in the Amazon. In addition, he defended the turtles in Nova Viçosa and placed himself in front of a tractor to avoid the construction of an avenue in the city. His activism in favor of the environment was thrilling. Frans Krajcberg was an artist who provoked reflections and dialogues with his protests. The ideas defended by his visceral works continue to be important and necessary in our society.

“When I see the material, I see he's going to yell at me, that's my job. I can't go out on the street and start screaming, they'll put me in jail or the hospital crazy,” explained Krajcberg. The way that the artist found was to take these pieces that were brutally destroyed, and with them work, create and fight for human beings to recognize that the planet is sick.

Frans Krajcberg's works carry a strong ethical dimension that goes beyond his life and art. His militancy and activism with revolutionary fervor showed his indignation against the massacre of our biodiversity. The artist's message was that we need to stop this cycle of destruction and stop these scandalous crimes against nature and humanity.

Learn more about the artist in the documentary "The cry of nature", produced by TV Brasil: