Former Bond Trader Pedro Barbosa on Breaking with the Art

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Former Bond Trader Pedro Barbosa on Breaking with the
Art Investment Trend
The site of last year’s World Cup and next year’s Olympics—as well as a
fair share of political controversy—Latin America’s largest country is
having a moment in the spotlight, and its art world is no exception. With
the eleventh edition of SP-Arte on the horizon, Pedro Barbosa, a
prominent Brazilian collector with a vision equal parts strong and
idiosyncratic, sat down in his contemporary São Paulo home to talk
about conceptualism, Ronald Reagan, and Brazilian kids these days.
ARTSY EDITORIAL
APR 1ST, 2015 10:17 PM
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Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
It wasn’t until 2001 that Goldman Sachs’s Jim O’Neill famously named
Brazil—along with Russia, India, and China—as one of the world’s
fastest-growing economic giants; but half a century earlier, in 1955,
Juscelino Kubitschek ran for president of the country on the campaign
slogan, “50 years of progress in five.” He won, and, as promised, oversaw
widespread industrial development of the nation. With modernization
came modern art: over the course of the 1950s, Brazil saw the first São
Paulo Biennial, the nascent years of the São Paulo Museum of Modern
Art, and a generation of artists intent on responding to the modern
condition. One aesthetic movement—concretism (and its offshoot, neoconcretism)—led the charge, putting the country on the map of the
international avant-garde. In their 1956 manifesto, the concrete
poets wrote that their medium “refuses to absorb words as mere
indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality, without history—
taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.”
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
Nearly six decades later, Pedro Barbosa won’t let convention bury his
vision for his collection. Barbosa is a trained engineer and retired bond
trader who, by his own estimation, has a “very mathematical mindset.”
Nevertheless, he doesn’t see artwork as an investment—or, to use the
terms of concrete poetry, as “indifferent vehicles” of monetary worth.
When I ask why he chose to start buying art, instead of, say, real estate or
stock, Barbosa’s response is firm: “Value isn’t an issue for me,” he says.
“What’s an issue for me is meaning.” As proof, he cites several works in
his collection that “don’t actually exist”: a Mario García Torres piece that
consists only of a title, an Yves Klein record that contains no sound. “You
don’t need to have a piece of work, as long as you have a thought
process,” he says, adding, “I don’t trade art.”
The only thing Barbosa has traded in recently is the business of trading;
reading, research, and intensive communication with the curator of his
collection, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, are a full-time job and his life’s work.
He knows the collection inside out; twice our call is interrupted—one
time due to a lapse in internet connection, another so that Barbosa can
let out his dog—and both times he jumps seamlessly back into analysis of
American and British conceptual art from the ’80s. “I am not an
accumulator of artwork,” he says. He only purchases pieces that make
sense in the context of the larger body of work. “You definitely have to
think big-time in order to develop a collection,” he says.
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
With Barbosa, it’s always the thought that counts. When I ask how and
why he got started, he describes the conceptual trajectory of his equally
conceptual collection. (Barbosa sees conceptual art as a kind of
challenging comfort zone; his Skype profile photo is of a neon sign
by François Curlet that reads, “Arte Concettuale Spaghetti.”) In 1999, he
made his first purchase: a kinetic Jesús Rafael Soto sculpture. “We in
Brazil have a big influence from concrete poetry and visual, geometric
poems and art,” he says. “So it was very easy for me to digest any kind of
geometric work.” From there, he became interested in the materiality of
1970s abstract sculpture. He skipped the 1980s, because of a theory he
has that art and the creation of wealth go hand in hand; that decade was
one of economic weakness in Brazil, and Barbosa believes that artistic
production suffered as a result. He began buying work from the mid-’90s
instead.
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
When the Brazilian market opened itself up in the 2000s, Barbosa says,
he realized he was no longer speaking the same language as the artists in
his country; he started to shop globally. “I decided to look more over
Latin America, but I ended up falling into the same trap of geometry,” he
says. “Then I moved more to what I call ‘new conceptual art,’ production
from the 2000s and 2010s that [incorporates] politics and embedded
things that [cannot be seen].”
His current collecting strategy is two-pronged. One of his focuses is
hyper-contemporary tech, multimedia, and performance works, mostly
produced by young New York artists and sold at Lower East Side galleries
like Essex Street and Reena Spaulings Fine Art; the other is audio and
textual documentation of conceptual art from the 1970s and ’80s,
like Robert Smithson’s records of his own work in Artforum. When I ask
what kind of art is popular on the Brazilian market these days, Barbosa
bristles a bit. “I don’t deal with popular artists,” he says, reiterating, “I
look for production that has a lot of thought process behind it, so it is
not popular at all.”
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
That being said, the collection is rich with works by conceptual art’s
heavy hitters. Five artists in Barbosa’s holdings (Daniel Steegmann
Mangrané, Eva Kotatkova, Asli Çavuşoğlu, Lisa Tan, and Antoine
Catala) are featured in this year’s New Museum Triennial. In an art-filled
alcove beneath a staircase in his São Paulo home there is a Lawrence
Weiner floor work featuring the words “The die is cast” in both English
and Portuguese. In a nearby apartment where he hosts an invite-only
artist residency, a set of record covers designed by Weiner—fusing
Barbosa’s interest in audio and language—are also on display. (Seth
Siegelaub, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, and Douglas Huebler are also
included in the conceptualism-themed exhibition.) Back in Barbosa’s
house, two stacked identical photographs of pianos (one untuned and
one tuned) by the Mexican artist Fernando Ortega hang on a narrow
wall, another chapter in his book of sound-related artworks. The collector
tells me that recently, at his son’s 11th birthday party, a young guest tried
to turn on a Nam June Paik television, knocking off a channel button.
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
Barbosa’s interest in art may be personal—he believes that it can change
the way we think, and wanted his children to grow up around it—as well
as specific, but his understanding of the art and financial markets is both
historical and global. (One of the reasons that he’s now interested in
archives from the ’80s is that he sees the deregulatory policies of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as “[sowing] the seeds of today’s society.”)
From the way he explains the evolution of the Brazilian art world over
the past 15 years, it seems to have seen a shift from local to global
resembling that of his own collection.
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
SP-Arte, for example, a global art fair in São Paulo, has grown from being
a small event to an important international happening (one that Barbosa
supports and Visconti helps curate). Barbosa says that young people can
increasingly live off of their work alone, so there are more Brazilian artists
and spaces, like Galeria Vermelho—with whom Barbosa has an
“extremely strong” relationship and from where he built the majority of
his Brazilian collection—that scout them. Additionally, “The number of
people on the collecting front has grown quite a bit,” he explains. “It’s
not in the hands of just a couple of people. I think that makes the market
better for dealers, for artists, and for collectors. You have diversity.”
There is also more diversity in the work that is available, and much of it
comes from the outside. Barbosa calls Mendes Wood DM, with whom
he also works closely, “the risk-taker gallery here in Brazil,” adding,
“They’re more international. They think of the world without borders.”
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
When Barbosa tells me about his son’s birthday party, I ask him what 11year-old boys in Brazil are into nowadays. He laughs and assures me that
it’s the same everywhere—video games, sports, and the like—a reflection
of the commodity culture that we live in. Still, in the age of art flipping,
websites that list artists under headers like “Sell Now” and “Liquidate,”
and 853-million-dollar auctions, Barbosa sees artwork as far more than
just a valuable commodity. “Stocks and real estate are investments,” he
says. “This is a cultural good.”
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
Photo by Beto Riginik for Artsy.
—Emily Rappaport
Explore SP-Arte 2015 on Artsy.
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