Book, Kaos Total[LS]

To celebrate Jorge Mautner's 75th birthday, João Paulo Reys and Maria Borba selected a sample from his unpublished collection and combined the material with the entirety of his lyrics, the most revered part of his work. The volume opens with an explosive notebook of images: Mautner's paintings, never published in a book, with an apparently naïve aesthetic, but which, when appreciated carefully, demonstrate rigor in the combination of colors and shapes. Then the compilation of lyrics. Pearls such as “Maracatu atomic”, “Lágrimas Negras” and “Vampiro”, arranged in chronological order and by album, reveal the fecundity of Mautner's songbook, which since the 1960s has enriched our culture with its inventiveness. Some songs, like “O rouxinol”, flirt with the children's universe, while others require a high degree of abstraction, like "Tempo sem tempo". The block ends with new songs. The poems bring yet another unfamiliar face of the multiple artist. What we see is an apparently uncontainable outpouring of feelings and words, guided by rhymes and rhythm. Or the conciseness of a one-line poem: “And now nothing remains”. In the poetic prose section, we come across some fiction, narrative and free verse poems, reflections that naturally wander through objects as varied as Freud, Bob Dylan and Schöenberg, in addition to the program of the Kaos Revolutionary Party. The final fragments bring the radicality of Mautner's creation, mixing specific icons such as Oxóssi arrows and treble clefs with the symbols of our alphabet. The multiple exclamations, which appear throughout the book, are even more frequent in the fragments: marks of the hyperbole that characterizes Jorge's thought. The trace of the “son of the Holocaust” is in verses that discuss the barbarity of wars, hunger, and the atomic bomb. On the other hand, simple love and playful humor bring lightness to these pages. Wealth has no end. As the curators would say, “your work is your life. The total Kaos, Jorge Mautner, never ends, he is always alive and in motion”.