This is how Hartwig Burchard described his artistic production in a text dated 10th December 1991 with the suggestive title A Key to the Work. Burchard seems to occupy a place in the recent history of art similar to the place that words occupy in his own visual works: in the last few decades, he remained submerged, becoming less and less recognisable and recognised in the present (and as present), even though, previously, his works were exhibited in major institutions such as MASP, in São Paulo, and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, in Rio de Janeiro, and featured in leading national and international collections. However, revisited at the present time, Burchard gives the impression he was never absent at all, quite the contrary: what is most striking is the extreme contemporariness of his work; his ability to establish a creative dialogue with the most topical production at a particular time in Brazilian and international visual arts, and to transform this dialogue into something that is still alive today. When he was 80 years old, for instance, Burchard produced a series of monotypes dedicated to forever-young Jean-Michel Basquiat (two of them showcased here). It is likely that Burchard became aware of Basquiat’s production when he lived in New York for a year in 1986. Leonilson – also a forever-young artist – is the fourth name to appear in a list of favourite artists – after Bertolt Brecht, Rudolph Nureyev and Louise Bourgeois. The list, found in one of his notebooks started in 1996, also features – as well as his most obvious influences such as Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer and Roland Barthes – Geraldo de Barros, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and, of course, Basquiat, alongside unexpected names such as Joãozinho Trinta and Zumbi dos Palmares (one of the few non-artists listed). 

Burchard is a unique case in Brazilian art. A German and Brazilian, an executive and an artist: these are his ‘many worlds’ to which the exhibition title refers, borrowing a verse jotted down in one of the artist’s notebooks. Born in Berlin in 1920, Burchard became Brazilian almost five decades later, in 1967. Having studied Economics at the University of Hamburg, he worked for many years in the manufacturing industry in different countries. He relocated to Brazil with his family in 1960 to take on a high-level post in a German multinational in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry based in São Paulo, having previously spent seven years in the country (from 1950 to 1957). In 1973, at 53, he decided to give it all up: job and family (‘I unmarried and married again, and my children were no longer kids’, he says in an autobiographical note). His aim was to fully dedicate his time and energy to the visual arts, an activity that he had always been fond but which until that point he had only practised as a self-taught artist in his limited spare time. ‘I knew that from then on I would make art in whichever way I could to express myself in an independent and free manner’, he explains. With this in mind, he settled in Paraty with his new spouse Lore. His first solo show was at MASP in 1976, with a presentation text by no less a person than Pietro Maria Bardi, who became a good friend and, in Burchard’s own words, a “mentor”.  

Bardi salutes ‘the solitary artist who works in Paraty with exemplary dedication. Burchard evades occasionalisms, every single detail is carefully meditated, his transcription (more graphic than plastic) is focused on the solemnity of clear peremptory concepts, full of effusion and peaceful harmony’. In that same year, Burchard had another exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, at Galeria Graffiti. In the following year, 40 of his monotypes were exhibited in a solo show at Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, also in Rio de Janeiro, and at Galerie Debret, in Paris. In subsequent years, he exhibited in a number of Brazilian and international institutions and galleries. He had three solo shows in MASP (1976, 1981 and 1985). In 1988, he moved to Walmsburg, in Germany, where he stayed until 1996. He took with him all the artworks he had produced until then – with the exception of those that belonged to institutions or private collectors. When he returned to Brazil, 7,342 artworks were left behind –including drawings, paintings, prints, monotypes, sculptures, ceramics, posters, artist’s books and photos – and stored in a German warehouse that caught on fire in 1997, destroying most of his production. The catastrophe, however, did not get him down. According to his wife Lore, after a few days he turned to her and said: ‘well, let’s start from scratch’. Not keen on gallery owners, he opened Atelier 18, in Paraty, to display and sell his work. The name is a clear allusion to Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, founded in Paris in 1927, a hub for artists interested in print. From then on, until his death in 2014, Burchard dedicated most of his time to prints, particularly monotypes. 

The monotypes exhibited here, all of them made between 1998 and 2000, show a close relationship that Burchard established between writing and visual work. This relationship connects him to a constellation of contemporary artists that not only add words to their illustrations and paintings but that often make them their centrepiece, for instance, Mira Schendel and Leonilson in Brazil, as well as Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer, internationally. Similar to Twombly and Kiefer, in Burchard’s monotypes, writing is an element that, sometimes, is less defined, and other times, more defined. In some of them, we can identify certain words that frequently appear back to front due to their method of printing. In others, like the four monotypes from the blue series exhibited here, the printed words are almost illegible, preserved more like gesture than words. Whilst Twombly and Kiefer use words based on a cultural mythical tradition – in general terms, Greek-Roman and German, respectively – in order to approach current issues, Burchard applies his own writings, compiled in notebooks, often in the form of quatrains. In each monotype, next to the signature and date, there is frequently a combination of two letters, letters and numbers or only numbers: these are codes that refer to the quatrains handwritten in his notebooks, like in the series BA (from which this exhibition’s title was extracted) that says: ‘night time scenes / furtive encounters / the voice of a poet / of many worlds’.

By resorting to personal writings, Burchard’s approach is closer to the way Leonilson deals with words in his work: as an extension (or replacement) of his diary. However, whilst in Leonilson, the writing is fully legible, in Burchard, similar to some works by Mira Schendel, the writing is undone, it becomes, to a certain extent, a ruin, only a coded version of what it was or what it could have been. On more than one occasion, Burchard stated that one should not look for the meaning of words added to the artworks. Perhaps this is why the code, despite being visible to spectators, will mostly remain incognito without the notebooks where the original quatrains were collected. In a text from 1985, Burchard defines the nature of his practice: ‘it is the writing of desire, pure supplement of the body in my painting. It is like a (non-existing) theory of elementary signs, letters and digits that only denote themselves. Nothing implied, nothing indicated, they are there as vestiges of a continuous intellectual activity that is not separated from deep movements within the body’. The secret, the fragmentation, the gap – in sum, that which cannot be apprehended  – lead to writing as desire or, borrowing a term from Barthes, of whom Burchard was a reader, writing as joy [jouissance]. In the artist’s own words: ‘From the beginning, men didn’t use the wall to draw the body constituted and polished by social use or custom, but the exploded, fragmented body, often reduced to its orifices and its protrusions – a foot, a mouth, an ear, a genital, an ideograph of desire’.