Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Bernardo Paz’s proud possessions

About thousand employees swarm around Bernardo Paz’s contemporary-art complex Inhotim nestled in the picturesque hills of southeast Brazil, away from Brazil’s mainstream collecting scenes in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Globetrotting art aficionados soak into the beauty of almost 500 stunning works like ‘Sonic Pavilion’ by Doug Aitken that employs high-sensitivity microphones put in a 633-foot hole to spread the bass murmur of Earth’s deft inner depths.

His botanical garden has over 1,400 species of palm trees, apart from other rare plants such as the titun arum from Sumatra. Sprawling over nearly 5,000 acres, it has room for 2,000 more artworks, at least. The 61-year-old lanky, mining magnate whispers are barely audible. A high school dropout, his first work experience was at a gas filling station run by his father.

Later he worked at stock exchange before taking up mining and erecting a business empire that finances operations of Inhotim (pronounced in-yo-TCHEEM) to the tune of about $60- $70 million each year. Certain masterpieces from Brazil’s boom time still survive, testifying past extravagance.

There are some private collections of contemporary-art elsewhere in Latin America accessible to the public, but none really has Inhotim’s exuberance. Curators and art historians marvel at the chaotic vision and sheer scale of Mr. Paz’s collection that devotes elaborate space to major artist projects. No surprise, Inhotim receives millions of visitors every year. In order to make it self-sustaining, the visionary collector intends to build hotels for visitors, a grand amphitheater, and even a ‘lofts’ complex for those keen to ‘live amid the collection’.

For now, he is more concerned with drawing the masses to works such as ‘Restore Now’ by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, in which texts by philosophers like Deleuze and Jacques Derrida are interspersed with eerie images of mutilated bodies. He quips, “There are works here that I haven’t entered yet, which everyone said were spectacular, but then why should I go in there? I don’t really consider myself that passionate for art. But gardens, that’s more what I like.”

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