Sozinho em verde [Alone in Green]

During Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–84), Antônio Henrique Amaral began painting his Banana series. By infusing this ubiquitous icon—one of Brazil’s primary exports—with symbolism, he effectively evaded censorship and political persecution, since, as he dryly remarked: “They can’t censor bananas.” Applying the derisive “Banana Republic” connotation to a nation fiercely proud of its modernization, Amaral portrayed the anthropomorphic fruit as overripe, bound, and bruised. Perversely vulnerable, these bananas become metaphoric bodies enduring political violence. In Alone in Green, the fruit is so tightly repressed by ropes that it bursts out of its skin, while the repeated rope in the upper section evokes prison bars. Reflecting metaphorical mythologies of the Brazilian body under dictatorship, Amaral’s bananas under duress become symbols of strife, suffering, yet also solidarity. When Amaral moved to New York in 1972, he continued the Banana series as a sustained symbolic resistance to repression in Brazil. Moreover, for him, its deadpan Pop banality was also a rejection of the culture of conspicuous consumption he found in the US. As the artist explained, he agreed to display these works in Manhattan’s commercial galleries as a means of “imposing, at any cost, an image out of context, of making it perfectly clear that there are values radically different from those of these arrogant people. It gave me great personal pleasure to put forth in the New York cultural scene an image totally foreign to that reality.” Unexpectedly, and ironically, Amaral’s banana paintings were wildly popular among New York collectors, turning him into one of the most successful artists of the Brazilian diaspora during that time.