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Afro-Brazilian Art∗ By Emanoel Araújo “The true, the supreme power of the art lies in walking heavy, resolute, steadfast, serene over all confusion and disturbance environment, isolated in a created mental world, indicating by intensity and eloquence, the mystery, the predestination of temperament”. (O Emparedado - Cruz e Souza) It is not an accident that, on the occasion of the National Meeting of Culture, which is organized one more time by the initiative from Culture Department and the Pinacoteca do Estado (State Gallery), organ of Secretariat of Culture of São Paulo State, by means of the Project Pinacoteca in the Park, has decided to resume a show organized in Frankfurt in 1994 and that is now presented to the public of São Paulo. At that time, the traditional Fair of Books of the city had as theme: “Brazil – A Confluence of Cultures”, organizing several events, among which, this exhibition that wanted to show the strength and influence that African Cultures provokes on Brazilian art. Nothing is more opportune, therefore, than the fact of resume one more time this subject-matter when, under the sign of Mario de Andrade, the National Meeting of Culture aims to reflect, from the vast diversity of a multicultural country, about our identity. Although the artists in the exhibition only represent the production of the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, what they have tried to reach was the unity of a theme that cover archaic productions, based above all in the symbols of the multiple facets of Brazilian religiosity. The African heritage was here the great generator of images that have become both ritual and artistic languages.

Among the most relevant examples of the black and mixed people contributions to the art creation and of the identity of Brazilian Civilization, Clarival do Prado Valladares notes that:

There has always been in Brazil, from eighteenth century, strong

presence of blacks and mestizos in the works of art. At first as apprentices, helpers or participants in working groups of religious monuments. The eighteenth century is culturally characterized in Brazil by the presence of mestizos and Africans in the authorship of works of art with biggest historical consequence.

This presence also sets throughout the middle of nineteenth century and only decreases when the Baroque era fades, giving way to neo-classicism and to academic eclecticism, directly related to the elites developments The predominance of blacks declined in face of the rise of its natural mestizo descent. Few countries included in the African diaspora have the story of their arts so marked by black people ethnicity. When we mentioned the name of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, Aleijadinho, who lived between 1738 and 1814, in Minas Gerais, the name of Valentine da Fonseca, Mestre Valentim, active in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the eighteenth century and the painter José Theóphilo de Jesus, who produced since the three last decades of the eighteenth century until the year of 1847, between Bahia and Sergipe, without to omit the almost legendary character of imaginary Francisco das Chagas,

∗ Translated by: Renato Araújo, Feb. 2010.

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called Chagas, o Cabra, also from eighteen century, or a name like the sculpture of saints Manuel Inácio da Costa, from the middle of nineteenth century, certainly we are indicating the remarkable examples of an epoch whose identification is fixed, almost entirely, in the work of their time and their area. (Valladares, 1977:221-27)

It should be also noted the great character of the Fluminense painting, Manoel da Cunha, son of a slave woman and he was slave itself, was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1737 and bought his manumission to produce his paintings, subsequent to emancipated himself, in the altarpieces of the church Ordem Terceira de São Francisco de Paula and to produce many portraits of providers of Santa Casa de Misericórdia do Rio de Janeiro. We could also mention Leandro Joaquim, carioca, whose magnificent examples of production are in Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes and in the Museu Histórico do Rio de Janeiro. This significant African presence in Brazilian arts until a so late period would undoubtedly mark definitely our identity, by a strange return over our own African roots which overlaps our identity. In fact, Pierre Verger notes that: One of the consequences of the slave trade was to reestablish contact with the distant, provoking the “coexistence” of people from different origins and determining what Léopold Sédar Senghor called miscegenation, not only biological but also cultural. Africans should adopt upon arrival in Brazil in the beginning, a way of life paved by their masters, but we point out that if in contact with these last, slaves become Europeanized, by a curious turnaround, theses masters were Africanized in touch with their slaves (Verger, 1996).

In the case of artistic forms associated to the universe of religious symbols, this process produced a paradoxical effect. Due to the police ban of Candomblé worship, the confiscation of their belongings, objects of worship, sculptures and the violation of sacred spaces around the country, a small number of artistic creation from the slaves, properly African, reached the present day. The fact of to be not allowed to the Africans in Brazil the handicraft production of objects and sculptures to their own services and worship, as noted by Clarival Valladares, turn their artistic inclination channeled to create the temples of official religion. (Valladares, 1969). The Coleção Perseverança from Alagoas, is an extraordinary iconographic heritage. This collection is constituted by wooden sculptures carved as copies of the remote tribal African areas that provided slaves, this kind of art still existing today in the same worships of that continent. The theme of Art and Religiosity in Brazil: African Heritages was thought as an archaeology of Afro Brazilian artistic production, in the sense that it aims to show how, in the field of religion, there are in the country forms of creation much more closer to the canons of the paleoafrican art – be the religion properly African, as the Yoruba Candomblé of Bahia or the Macumba from the southeast of Brazil, be it instead, the product of cultural fusion exemplified by the Umbanda or by the forms of popular Catholicism. The saints of Nó-de-pinho from Vale do Paraíba São Paulo, for example, are proofs of this iconography. George Preston, in an essay on sculpture, emphasizes that:

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Anyone familiar with African art is aware that it is essentially a reductionist aesthetic in which shapes, lines, and masses are abstracted or reduced to produce simpler forms than the ones we observe in reality. On the intellectual level, African sculpture was designed to be looked at as an evocation of certain ideas, not a literal imitation of reality. This explains why a salient detail of the structure or anatomy of a thing or a reduction of the whole to an essential simplification was a dominant motif in African art. (Preston, 1987: 37-39) Surely, it is possible to understand the production of contemporary artist such as Rubem Valentim, Ronaldo Rêgo or Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos according to the “theories of non-construction, reduction, frontality repetition of the primary forms”, whose principles Preston states, describing the formal and basic canons of neo-african art in diaspora that are thus formulated: Tension between an implied and actual axis; Tension between implied and actual symmetry; Primary geometric form in the configuration of a mass, plane, negative or positive area of space, concave or convex forms, closed or open form; regularity of an overall rhythm or pattern interrupted by randomly arranged adherent motifs, formal surprises, or fugue like inversions of the pattern’s basic unit. Lack of conformity between painted areas and the surfaces of planes. Visual punning in which reduced forms become ambivalent and may be read as alternately representing one thing or its synonym or antithesis. ‘Pars pro toto’ motifs which use a salient aspect of a thing to represent its entirety. Mixed media combinations of what to the Westerner appear as irrationally related textures, patterns, colors, objects or ideas. (Preston, 1987) Thus, in view of these guidelines, we verified that the persistence of African aesthetic runs through near examples both in the popular expressions and in the scholarly expressions. The votive pieces (ex-votos) are representations of faces, body parts or whole figures which shows an illness to be cured and are found virtually everywhere in the countryside. They contain artistic changes of products with deep influence of the African structures. Luis Saia shows in his essay on Brazilian popular sculpture these black African convergences in the production of these miracles (votive pieces) that extend to the conception and to the technique of sacred Catholic statuary. On the other hand, analyzing the determining characteristics of the sculpture of the ex-votos and their points of contact with African art – reductionism, low relief eyes and idiographic fixing of details – put forward solutions that also can be found in the small and extraordinary production of Bahian sculptor Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos (1926 – 1962). From the account of Agnaldo, Clarival do Prado Valladares recorded the building principles of the carrancas (gargoyles) used by the sculptor, which were passed down by his teacher, also remarkable sculptor Biquiba Guarani, author of impressive carrancas that for years sailed around the São Francisco river:

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In the figure, all that is in one side should be on the other, and all that is on the top must be different from what is underneath. The figure should have a look at point where nobody knows what and where it is. The mouth should be in front of who appreciate it. The work must be punished. The cut has to be strong to withstand with the years the coats of paint. The Carranca well done is that when viewed in the mirror of water moves as a living being. (Valladares, 1983) These tenets of pure instinct from Biquiba Guarani must have served to the building of the vocabulary of the works of Agnaldo. He also explains by the way of ancestry, or the collective unconscious: but the most striking of his production ought to his sources, not to the ultimate bound with the africanism. If Agnaldo has strong ties with Africa, towards compliance with the tenets and canons already mentioned, the production of Bahian Mestre Didi (1917) is linked to the African religion, more specifically, to the worship of Candomblé, by ties of religion practice, by the rescue of an iconography of narrow liturgical use and also a narrative construction of knowledge, cultural and spiritual experience. His sculptural production is strictly attached to the religious authority he has. In the worship of ancestors and in the relationship with the forces of nature that makes their language, their religious affiliations are fused to create works of great quality, in which he uses the most varied materials – plastic, cowry shells, straw, wood and clay – to build volumes, rhythms and graphics that reflect the myths of the pantheon of the African orixás. His pursuance for translating the encounter between gods and men results in this wholeness of the merger between religion and art, which makes Mestre Didi the truer dignitary. Heir of the same tradition is also a small but extraordinary work of other Bahian; Helio de Oliveira, whose brief career, interrupted by early death, the art plan reflects the intensity of an experience deeply marked by religious ties. Heir of an axé (religious vital power), an assogba, a prince of Candomblé, destined for his grandfather to continue his religious activities in the temple, he preferred, not without intense conflict, transplant It into the field of art and of an language: the engrave. Set in an intense and powerful the form of the images of Iawôs and Pegis, an universe that always was peculiar to him. In this same direction, is revealing the work of Ronaldo Rêgo. In the silence of the sacred place where hi lives in Jacarepagua in Rio de Janeiro, magical center of religious practice, he explores the deep relationship between nature and the art of religions of African origins. Referring to the enigma of creative signs and symbols that passes for his sculptures of wrought iron or to the wooden painted boxes. His small sculptures of iron result in tooling the symbiosis between Candomblé and Umbanda. Unveiling the changes incorporated into the religious practice of these worships in big urban centers in the country. It is in the form of scratched points and in the buildings of boxes – oracles that lies on wealthy of this imaginary. Also Eneida Sanchez let herself to be impregnated in-depth by the image journey as a metaphor of life, so present in the Yoruba thought and in the rituals of divination from Ifá, to built altars that talk about the journey of the gods and

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men and use the same metals present from nine centuries in the Pegis from Orixás, telling through the visual art their stories. Among the artist present in this exhibition, Rubem Valentim (1922 – 1991) is certainly the greatest established by the national critic of art. His long career as an artist, since the fifties in Bahia until the nineties in São Paulo, where he died, left a work built eloquently. In his long resume it shows a series of exhibitions in the country and abroad, including in Rome, Italy, where he also lived. Have also received significant critical studies as the one from Clarival de Prado Valladares, Ferreira Gullar, Jayme Maurício and Olívio Tavares de Araújo, who has added to his also long bibliographic references. Recently, a retrospective of his work was the subject of a huge essay by Frederico Morais. His work is today in Brasilia, where the artist lived for a couple of years, waiting silently for a building of a Foundation. The house of Rubem Valentim is an old inspiration from him and his wife, Lucia Valentim, faithful guardian of this invaluable heritage to Brazil. José Guilherme Merquior, analyzing the work of Valentine, said: If all art is a game of signs, semiotic function, Rubem Valentim practice a little more than fifteen years a plastic super-semiotic, an art committed to the conscious transformation of the sign. The afro-bahian foundations of the abstract forms of the Valentim are known. His graphic formations are a stylization of the sign-fetishes from Candomblé, of the ritual universe resting on the emblems of the Orixás from Nagô. In his clean and symmetric spaces, it´s not difficult discern, well defined by the harmonic refinement of a flat colored, well cut out in two or three dimensions, the unexpected geometric avatars of the bow and arrow of the Oxossi, the Hunter god, from bellicose knife of Ogum, from the double ax of the king Xangô, from whip of his woman Iansã, from abebê of his mother Iemanjá or from jupterian scepter of the Oxalá (Merquior, 1977:261 – 263) In what does the production of the present artists are distinguished in the Brazilian artistic scenario? For sure, the difference is in continuity of the African presence in Diaspora revealed through his works and what is also attested by the pioneer record of Pierre Verger that has his followers in the works of Adenor Gondim, Eustáquio Neves, Luis Paulo Lima and the Italian Lamberto Scipione. Who caught our attention to this phenomenon of continuity was the anthropologist Nina Rodrigues, since 1904, in an article published by Kosmos Review, where point out the characteristic of the strange proportions found in the carving of the black and bahian sculptor Vitorino dos Anjos, in the Major Chapel (Capela-Mor) of Campinas Cathedral, in São Paulo. Conscious or unconscious submission to the principles of an ancient art – it does not matter. What is relevant, in this time of great debate about multiculturalism and cultural diversity, is that we have here examples of an art generated from its proper canons, in some other ways than European, which serve to clarify what we are and permit us to make a glimpse into the possibility of change toward a cultural behavior committed to a new identity. Emanoel Araujo Director and Curator of Museu Afro Brasil

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Bibliographical References

Araújo, Emanoel (org.). A mão afro-brasileira – Significado da contribuição artistica e histórica. Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil / Tenenge, Brasília, 1988.

Merquior, Jorge Guilherme, Rubem Valentim In: II Festac –

Festival Mundial de Artes e Cultura Negra e Africana, Lagos Nigéria: Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil, 1977. Exhibition Catalogue.

Preston, George Nelson e Araujo, Emanoel. Afro-minimalismo

brasileiro (Brazilian Afrominimalist). São Paulo. Museu de Arte São Paulo / Best Editora Ltda., 1987.

Rodrigues, Nina. As Belas Artes nos Colonos Pretos do Brasil –

A Escultura, Kosmos, Rio de Janeiro, 1904. Saia, Luiz. Escultura popular brasileira. São Paulo: Edições

Gaveta, 1944. Valladares, Clarival do Prado. O impacto da cultura africana no

Brasil in II Festac – Festival Mundial de Artes e Cultura Negra e Africana, Lagos Nigéria: Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil, 1977. Exhibition Catalogue.

Valladares, Clarival do Prado Iconologia Africana no Brasil.

Revista Brasileira de Cultura nº 1, jul/set. Brasília Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1969.

Verger, Pierre, Influências África Brasil, Brasil África – Pierre

Verger 90 anos. São Paulo Pinacoteca do Estado / Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1992. Exhibition Catalogue.