Carnaval-Ritual

In "Carnaval-Ritual: Carlos Vergara e Cacique de Ramos", Maurício Barros de Castro, writer, teacher and curator, specialist in art history and popular culture presents a critical analysis of the meeting between Vergara and the Cacique and reflects on the issues that led the artist to look out of his studio and seek popular culture. In the 1970s, Carlos Vergara turned his gaze and his camera to the street carnival of Rio de Janeiro, more precisely, to the neighborhood block Cacique de Ramos. The images that Vergara produced in Cacique de Ramos constitute one of the most important series of his career and contemporary Brazilian art, as well as celebrate one of the more old and traditional carnival blocks of Rio's carnival. In a fluent writing, the author draws a line of analysis that follows the artist's actions with the block from the harshest period of the military dictatorship to the beginning of redemocratization in Brazil. The book concludes with a meeting of Bira Presidente - the top leadership and founder of the Cacique de Ramos block - and Carlos Vergara, held in 2020 under the famous tamarineira of uranos street block, the block's home, to celebrate this beautiful partnership. "All this makes this book a historical document and precious cultural criticism," says curator Luiz Camillo Osório in the preface.