Claudio Tozzi's 'Pós-imagem' at MACC Links His Graphic Art to Debord's Spectacle Critique

The exhibition 'Pós-imagem' at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas (MACC) offers a new reading of Claudio Tozzi's graphic production, aligning it more closely with Guy Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle than with American Pop Art. Curated by Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias, the show presents a non-chronological overview of Tozzi's work from the 1960s to the 2020s, organized around the concept of 'post-image.' Zacarias, who is also director of the Museu de Artes Visuais da Unicamp (MAV), argues that Tozzi's images become autonomous and mediate social relations, akin to commodities. The exhibition highlights Tozzi's use of mass culture imagery—signs, advertisements, comics, and photo-novels—in his serigraphs from the Nova Figuração phase, employing a détournement-like strategy to create new meanings. It also explores the physiological sense of post-image in his 1960s works, where solarization creates a 'luminous violence' that leaves residual images on the retina. In his later geometric phase, Tozzi moves away from figuration toward abstract images without clear referents. Zacarias sees a unifying impulse in Tozzi's work: a search for visual creation opposed to the mercantile instrumentalization of images. The exhibition opens with two works, 'Astronauta' (1969) and 'Território' (2020), donated by Tozzi to the MAV, which also houses collections of Geraldo de Barros and Anatol Wladyslaw, researched by Zacarias's group.