Afonso Tostes

The book dedicated to Afonso Tostes (born Belo Horizonte, 1965) revises the artist's research path, his influences, his creative process, and finally his formalized works, when working with iron, wood, rope, in addition to found objects that he acquires by barter in his travels. "Afonso Tostes is a contemporary popular artist. A capoeira practitioner, a man of the sea, the orishas and handicraft; in fact, he uses the same tools as crafts artists. Tostes conveys the sense of the popular in himself, his experiences and the path he decided to take. Nevertheless, his work isn't formally close to what is called "popular art". By embracing and re-signifying popular knowledge in his production, Tostes connects his work to Art Povera, and to other movements in the history of art and, above all, makes it resonate with the actions of Brazilian conceptual artists of the 1970s generation. "Between the city and nature", the first publication about Tostes' trajectory, is organized in segments and visual interludes. The segments Are linked through texts, sketches and images as in a travel journal." --Pages 11-12.