O ARTISTA
Nerone Prandi
Brazilian cartoonist, painter, performer, and architect born in the city of Araraquara (countryside of São Paulo state) in 1970 under the name of Mario Augusto Silveira Brandão. Based in São Paulo city since the 1990s, he started to dedicate his life to art in 2006, when his current alias was adopted: Nerone comes from the Italian name of the Roman emperor Nero, and Prandi is the surname of one of his grandmothers.
After graduating from an architecture and urbanism school in 1995 and practicing architecture for 11 years, he decided to focus on drawing pictures, resuming a habit he had as a kid. During his first years as an artist, he survived tonsil cancer. Initially, his portraits featured explicit scenes of sex and masturbation among men, with elements of BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism), in a series entitled “Fast Drip”. Soon after, he came up with “Bad Hair Days”, a comic strip set in a hair salon, and LesFUNKYTOONS, a colourful, ongoing series that originated the posters donated (see below). In 2015 and 2016, Nerone also produced videos for a performance/theater play called “Anatomia do Fauno”.
As politics in Brazil have been worsening since the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, Nerone also created a Tumblr with short, critical, and often pessimistic “intuitions” called “Cassandra da Pompéia”. It is a reference to the Cassandra in Greek mythology, a princess whose accurate prophecies were not believed by those around her. The most recent — and sharpest — series, however, is “Polititika”, a pun mixing words “política” (politics) and “titica” (Brazilian Portuguese for “poop”), where political authorities are portrayed as zombies in black, white, and red.
Besides São Paulo, Nerone’s drawnings have been exhibited in San Francisco (USA) and Brussels (Belgium). The material Nerone donated to the Schwules Museum in August 2018, through journalist José Gabriel Navarro, consists of three portraits made between 2013 and 2014 with pencil and India ink; and eight posters designed with Wacom pen and tablet, plus Adobe Photoshop. The posters were originally reproduced and pasted up on the walls of São Paulo with wheatpaste, technique known as “lambe-lambe” in Brazil and eventually seem as a political statement.
José Gabriel Navarro, journalist
Formado em Arquitetura e Urbanismo em 1995, há doze anos me dedico quase exclusivamente ao sagrado ofício de desenhar e publicar sacanagem em blogs de minha autoria.
Tendo o sexo, a pornografia e o universo LGBT como temas principais de meu trabalho, já fiz duas exposições na Bélgica (uma na galeria de arte ZSenne Art Lab e outra no cruising bar Duquesnoy, ambos em Bruxelas); eu também participo de vários eventos LGBTs em São Paulo, como colaborador. Já vendi camisetas; fiz festas; colaborei em duas edições do festival de cinema e arte erótica Pop Porn (ambientação para as festas de abertura do festival) realizado anualmente em São Paulo; fiz e projetei vídeos para o espetáculo performático Anatomia do Fauno; faço bico de barman; distribuo adesivos e colo lambe-lambes sempre que possível; e, ainda por cima, faço crochê como ninguém.