Letters to Affection - Pedro Carneiro's first solo exhibition - invites us to become a collective, building new assumptions and poetic turns about the continuous crossroads of existence in diaspora, as a black body that is willing to look at the vicissitudes that are part of its stories, as well as the overflow of its humanity from the reunion with its own and the various degrees of feelings that navigate its existential sea, weaving lines and contours through his works to perpetuate other memories.

 

Bell Hooks teaches us that the perspective of aesthetics is, beyond the very idea and theory of art, a way in which we look at and inhabit spaces in order to also become an integral part of what we build. Beauty is also belonging.

 

As in Conceição Evaristo's concept of "writinence" (writing experiences), Pedro Carneiro's pictorial dimension presents the daily life, experiences, desires, and dreams of a people that reneges on the place of an object and takes up again the place of protagonism, presence, and power - in the scope of existing, of granting, and of allowing - subverting the hegemonic logic of a common place, marginalized, violent, and disposable.

 

Transcending trauma without erasing it becomes a sacralized strategy in his brushstrokes. If once the shades of gray reinforced violent aesthetics and airs of melancholy, today they are a starting point for claiming these bodies in uprisings, added to allegories that deal with possibilities of healing, protection, claim, love, and agency in the most varied forms.

 

The dimension of affections takes on bodies presented in the foreground, through the formulation of possible futures embedded in a certain symbolic anachronism, traversed in the elements that constitute the spaces on each canvas: in the ancestral technologies of recovery amidst medicinal herbs and bulkheads, associated with divinized and heroic presences of personas that become real and alive, plotted under the framework of a landscape that is not fully revealed, but that is desired and inhabited in the house of the matriarchs of Oswaldo Cruz, in the Quilombos that come from Palmares and end in Irajá, are strengthened in the sound corners of Madureira, pass through filmic ideals of Wakanda, Dakota, Soho.

 

It experiences the theatricality and the black political power led by Abdias Nascimento and company, it clothes the bodies protected by the sword of Ogum, it salutes the seas and asks for blessings to inaugurate a new phase that embraces, caresses in pink tones the longings of a people.

 

Abdias, Beatriz, Lélia, Mr. Nilson, Mr. Tonico, Ms. Ridete, Ms. Luiza, Ms. Glória, Mr. Carlos and so many others present tools and pack presences that walk together, where the idea of Sankofa is presence, vital energy, ASÈ. After all, how to build possible futures without revering those who came before?

 

 

Thayná Trindade

(1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) Lives, studies and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Curatorial Assistant and Researcher at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR).

She has a degree in Art History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Associate Curator at 01.01 Art Platform.

 

 

 

Service
Opening: 09.06.2022 | 6pm - 9pm
Visitation: 09.08.2022 - 10.08.2022 
Tue - Fri: 11am - 7pm | Sat: 1pm - 6pm

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Technical file:

Text: Thayná Trindade

Graphic Design: Maria Dantas
Press Office: CWeA Comunicação
Lighting: Antonio Mendel

Photography: Rafael Salim and Pedro Carneiro
Montage: Gilmar Pires

Translation: Leonardo Souza