The bananas of Battlefield 2 (1973) are on the turn. Painted in oil, grossly enlarged on a meter-long canvas, their yellow skin is beginning to brown at the edges and shrink, revealing the soft fruit underneath. A table knife bisects the frame horizontally, having cut the banana into three sections, which are served up, rather genteelly, on a plate. Antônio Henrique Amaral does not end his still life there, however, but introduces a surreal addition to the scene: a length of rope, reduced in proportion, binding two banana sections to the knife.

Amaral started painting bananas in 1968, part of a wave of Brazilian artists – including peers Waldemar Cordeiro, Antonio Dias, and Antonio Manuel – who broke away from the prevailing dominance of abstract painting and embraced a local version of Pop art. Amaral’s first banana canvas came a year after the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s eponymous album, featuring cover art by Andy Warhol depicting a single example of the fruit. In Warhol’s Banana (1967), the fruit’s phallic and, in turn, comedic qualities are emphasized in how it curves erect and stands to attention across the LP sleeve.

In the North American context, the banana has mostly been mined for its innuendo and absurdity, from Harold Lloyd’s slipping on a skin in the 1917 silent film The Flirt, to Maurizio Cattelan’s choice of this particular fruit to tape to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in Comedian (2019). It was thus fitting that among Claes Oldenburg’s visions for giant phallic public sculpture – such as Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969) realized in New Haven, Connecticut – Warhol’s fellow Pop artist also planned a banana work. Sadly, Oldenburg’s 1965 desire to install a massive banana in Times Square never came to fruition.

If North American artists could afford to joke around, Amaral’s bananas were entangled, like the ropes of Battlefield 2, in a complex web of geopolitics and tricky questions of national and colonized identity. The artist was working within a legacy left by the early 20th-century Brazilian Modernists, in which the fruit’s supposedly ‘exotic’ tropical characteristics were compared to the harsh reality of the country’s poverty. Tropical (1917) by Anita Malfatti, for example, is a Social-realist painting depicting a weary, mixed-race woman heaving a huge basket laden with bananas and other fruit. More emancipatory is Tarsila do Amaral’s A Negra (The Black Woman, 1923), a highly stylized portrait of a naked Afro-Brazilian woman sitting cross-legged. In a country that was one of the last to abolish slavery, the nude woman was intended as a symbol of freedom. However, Amaral adds a heavy note of doubt to this supposed newfound racial equality, with a large banana plant leaf dominating the frame – a warning that economic freedom remained (and remains) elusive. It’s a message shared by Lasar Segall’s Bananal (1927), a Cubism-inflected portrait of an Afro-Brazilian man dwarfed by banana crops. Contrast these images to those proliferated by Hollywood’s 1940s makeover of singer Carmen Miranda, with her headdress of bananas, sexualized dancing, and pantomiming of Brazilian identity, and a stark gap opens up between the fruit’s symbolism in North America and what it connotes on the South American continent. (This was a gap Paulo Nazareth played with in Banana Market/Art Market, a work presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011, in which an avalanche of bananas spilled out of a camper van.)

Amaral came to the fruit by way of drawing and woodcuts which, from the advent of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1964, featured nightmarish visions of demons, generals, and anthropomorphized machines. ‘I made a point of becoming a pamphleteer,’ he said. Works of this era make direct reference to US interference in South American politics and its backing of the Brazilian coup d’etat that saw the overthrow of the democratically-elected government. In 1968, this frustration manifested in Boa Vizinhança (Good Neighbor, 1968), in which a banana is painted across the US and Brazilian flags, its title an ironic reference to Washington’s anti-communist South American policy. In the so-called ‘banana republics’ of Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala, the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) was one of the largest landowners, dominating both the region’s labor market and political direction.

Brazil had entered its so-called ‘Years of Lead’, the most repressive period of the dictatorship. Many artists and musicians from the Tropicália movement fled overseas; but a worse fate lay in store for political opponents and those on the Left. With the kind of overt ‘pamphleteering’ Amaral had been engaged in now out of the question, bananas became a way for the artist to continue making works of social commentary while evading censorship. The fruit appeared in paintings singular, bunched together, cut up, and bound. In Detail with Rope (1972), a broken stem seems to hang from a noose; in Suspended Blue (1973), another banana is trussed up against a murky blue background. Rope, also 1973, shows just a cross section of banana bound, as if to a tree or a post, by ropes, the fruit approximating a human body; but Battlefield 2 is the most violent of the artist’s works from this period.

Seen decades on, Battlefield 2 retains its power, even divorced from the context in which it was first shown. There is something very alive about the roughness of the banana skin, something very raw about the exposure of the softening pulp underneath, and something daunting in its bondage to the knife. As much as the work was a commentary on the politics of the time, for the viewer, then and now, its visceral power lies in how bodily Amaral makes the fruit appear – further emphasizing the sense of unease the painting provokes.

Battlefield 2 and other paintings by Antônio Henrique Amaral will be on view in the Survey Sector at Paulo Kuczynski (São Paulo).

The Estate of Antônio Henrique Amaral is represented by Casa Triângulo (São Paulo) and Mitchell-Innes & Nash (New York). 

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London.

Published on November 22, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed image: Antônio Henrique Amaral, Battlefield 2, 1973 (detail). Courtesy of Paulo Kuczynski.