The Dead Rise at the Venice Biennale

How could it, when there are still artists like Affandi to discover? A movie-theatre clerk who taught himself how to paint in the nineteen-thirties, already renowned in his native Indonesia, he is represented in the Central Exhibition by a glorious shriek of a self-portrait, in wormy streaks of yellow and green. Adriano Pedrosa, the Biennale’s curator and the artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, excels at connecting artists separated by vast chasms of time and geography—walking around, I sensed that if Affandi, who died in 1990, had taught himself to weave, he might have made art like Shalom Kufakwatenzi, a young Zimbabwean with two textile works in the show. (At times, Affandi very nearly did weave with paint, squeezing thick lines of pigment straight onto the canvas and arranging them with his hands.) There’s the same bright, unapologetic raggedness, the stuff of life frozen in mid-wriggle.