The Two Times of the Image 

It is quite likely that if we were to choose a common phrase to characterize the current global  situation, we would come across the following statement: "We live in a world of images." This may  sound, for some, like an avalanche that must be contained; for many, like material for editing, and  for others, as sources of reference to be incorporated as new words into the current lexicon. After  all, images are striking presences, acting as texts filled with fragments of the world that, regardless  of the meaning they take for others, have communication as their central theme. 

Paulo Andrade, in the mid-1970s, was already aware of the value of this commonly used phrase.  Engaged in the program of a generation that longed for communication and the circulation of ideas,  and heightened by living in a time of great political tension, Andrade began a journey informed by  changes in artistic tradition that, influenced by mass culture, Pop Art, French Nouveau Réalisme,  and Conceptualism, subverted mechanisms of image production and presentation. Media and  techniques originating from graphic design and themes derived from the media and everyday events  formed the raw material for his new work, reinforcing the emergent role of art in subverting the  established order of current systems and hegemonic discourses. 

Postal Art was the direction that Andrade chose as his language in the 1980s, to express the  counterpoints he saw in politics and in Brasília, where he had recently moved. On the postcards,  Andrade had space to circulate the artist's desire to inform and protest, while also allowing for the  articulation of different media: cutting, pasting, assembling, overlaying, photocopying. Indigenous  people, Xavantes, Xingu, Anthropology, and the monuments of the Capital were recurring themes  that revolutionized the political scene, transcending the limits of the capital, after all, it was not  every day that an indigenous person demanded space. Life was more dynamic, complex, and less  perfect than the reality printed on the postcards sold in bulk at stationery shops and newsstands.  And, in Andrade's hands, the postcards transformed from unrealistic display objects into vehicles of  medium and message. 

Postcards, better known for their role as tools of tourist propaganda, presented a heterogeneous  collection of images of Brazil. In this universe, some images of rare beauty emerged, such as the  photographs by Wolfgang Jesco von Puttkamer, taken during his stays in the Xingu Indigenous  villages in the 1960s. Puttkamer's quest was to transcend documentary registration to reach the  atavistic core of indigenous culture: its origins before the touch of civilization. 

Fascinated by these images, Andrade began in 1981 a series of collages on postcards, which he  began selling in various places around the city, such as bars and theaters. The interest in the 

postcards was considerable, encouraging the artist to produce new collages on colored vergé paper,  applying colored pencils and enlargements made through photocopying, creating subseries that  were also sold throughout the city. And, as the essence of postal art is to be a medium of  dissemination, Andrade's works reached the Postal Art Nucleus at the XVI São Paulo Art Biennial,  which, after exhibiting these series, continued to carry the project forward, with new editions from  1983 onward. 

In 1984, the works took on a new form, being produced through silkscreen printing with India ink  on graphic film, where images of an official Brasília, featured on postcards, were used as  backgrounds for large-scale images of indigenous people from the Xingu. Twelve original prints  were made, with 80 copies of each. Once again, the postcards' vocation for circulation was fulfilled,  and they were displayed at the Funarte and the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro. The  limited edition sold out, and Andrade's collage postcards became collector's items, today  constituting part of the iconographic memory of the country. 

Is life an eternal return to the same starting point? And, upon arrival, does what returns simply  amount to more of the same? 

We know that the concept of time is measured by the presence of the subject in the world. Each  occurrence occupies its place in the historical continuum and leaves its mark there. Sometimes  indelible, sometimes not so much. And the artist, as a being who reflects on the conditions of time,  elaborates and re-elaborates, plastically and visually, what life presents as material for their poetic  expression. 

In 2014, Andrade decided to revisit the concept present in the postcards and began a new series of  works, following a common procedure adopted by artists: the recovery of ideas that were once part  of their trajectory and that, once again, make sense. In this movement of revisitation, something  new arises, updating the practice and revealing historical transformations. 

In The Eternal Return, which gives the name to this new series, Andrade responds, in his own way,  to what Nietzsche presents as a question in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: occurrences in time are not  infinite but repeat themselves, with differences. This is true for the themes that Andrade reflects on  and connects: the indigenous issue in Brazil and urban growth, with Brasília as the focal point. 

In the new production, the artist revisits the concepts in light of current events and adapts his  technical procedures, combining contemporary techniques with traditional ones, incorporating new  "partners" into the conception of the montage. The prints are now digitally produced, using papers 

that resist the passage of time better, and the images, which are combinations of photographs of  anonymous authorship found on the internet and others provided by photographer friends with long  careers as photojournalists, are intervened by Andrade with watercolor and acrylic paint,  transforming the original into a new work with a strong pictorial quality. In the new series, the  indigenous people remain, resisting non-representation, now inserted into a chaotic urban context,  far from the modernist ideals that originally gave rise to them. 

After all, what remains, in the return, is the sky.