O Atentado de Eduardo Srur

da pintura de cavalete para a intervenção urbana

Abstract

This text discusses the production of artist Eduardo Srur, particularly the 2004 action Atentado (Attack), seeking to investigate how Srur's pictorial practice was transferred from the studio to the urban space, while still maintaining a dialogue with the history of painting. To this end, we chose to study the artist's poetics, understood here as the set of aspects that are important for the realization of artistic activity, such as the operating modes promoted. This article suggests that in Atentado (Attack) — an intervention in which the artist explodes balloons filled with paint on billboards in the city of São Paulo — Srur made use of other artistic references, distant from the representative painting, of a realistic-symbolic nature, which identifies his early works. To carry out the action, the artist employed expedients that derived from the “action painting” of the 1940s and 1950s and also from the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Through dialogue with these models, the pictorial activity, which becomes an interventionist activity, subsists through unconventional materials and methods.