Drafts of the real
By Moacir dos Anjos
Translated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes
Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias’ offers, through paintings, a glimpse of his daily life over the years: from his time as a child and teenager growing up in the countryside of Minas Gerais, to adulthood in Rio de Janeiro. These are two Brazilian locations that, despite being relatively close, bear immense distances in terms of the material and symbolic lives that they offer to their inhabitants. At times, the paintings depict plausible situations such as work or celebrations; at others, however, they narrate dubious scenes, like the contact of living beings with inhuman entities. In either case, his paintings create equivalents, in the realm of the sensible, of a unique life experience in which real and imagined intertwine.
Almost all of Ozias’s compositions describe open spaces, especially rural ones—woods, crops, empty land, waterfalls, rivers. Spaces that are not, however, simply natural landscapes with no sign of human presence. They frequently represent people working the land, performing religious rituals, or even taking part—as victims or as perpetrators—in the atrocties that marked the colonisation of Brazil. In Caça Humana, 2001, white men on horseback chase down and chain semi-naked black children who try to hide amid the leafless trees of an almost dark wood. The image’s appealing formal qualities and composition are overshadowed by the brutality it conveys. Other works take place in village spaces: whether the terreiros around which small villages are organised, or the churches, cemeteries, and other buildings that are markers of social life in these villages. Elsewhere Ozias turned to urban settings, like the sambódromos, the vast structures where Carnival parades take place in metropolises like Rio.1 Yet a large number of his works describe locations without coordinates, that is, places in which traces of this world converge with another, supernatural world, spaces where healing and pain seem to coexist. What is virtually absent from his work is the representation of indoor spaces and everything that happens in them. The artist does not seem to have been interested in the dynamics of life in closed environments, preferring events that occur in the public realm, whether good or bad.
This may be the reason why Ozias’s paintings always depict shared, rather than individual, subjects and experiences. In some of them, the characters are gathered for a festivity, be it the parade of the samba schools during Carnival or the syncretic religious festival that pays homage to Saint John, celebrated mainly in the inland regions of Brazil.2 Other times, they are at work—almost always in rural areas—the subjects brought together as a social body by planting, harvesting, fishing, or mining. Yet another body of paintings show men, women, and children participating in religious ceremonies, whether Christian, Candomblé, or an intentionally confusing mix of both. Last, there are compositions where a group of subjects together face an extraordinary and harrowing situation, as a representation of death or the Devil seems to prefigure their imminent end. Whatever the situation, the experiences portrayed in Ozias’s paintings are invariably collective, often explored in series.
In the various paintings of samba school parades, for example, the composition is defined by two distinct groups: the costumed dancers at street level, and the spectators in the high bleachers that run along and delimit the avenue. They show dense groupings of people occupied in various ways at the same event, sometimes filling the entire compositional space, confusing the city landscape and the human figures within. Yet, the noisy joy of Carnival described in these works contrasts with the rigid organisation of bodies, creating a sense of tension and with uncertainty. In these paintings, there is no clear distinction between subject and form.
"It is as if the paintings were suggesting a plot, demanding that viewers project their own worldview onto the artist’s work."
Although Ozias's devotional scenes are not as crowded as those of the samba school, they too often feature large gatherings of people, directing their rapt attention toward a religious leader or supernatural event. These works combine symbols from various religions, a sign of the syncretism that, for a long time, marked religion a space of resistance in Brazil, but which, in recent decades, has become the target of racist attacks from those who cannot stand difference. With unique irony and lightness, Ozias brings together a critical view of the inequalities of the country and an affirmation of the happiness that is possible under these conditions.
Night scenes predominate in Ozias’s imagery, though he seldom places people or things in the shadows. The contrasting colours vibrate and create clear boundaries between forms, giving the impression that things are being represented under intense luminosity—whether a day or night scene, observable even in his paintings of demons and angels that seem to exist outside of historical time. This incandescence is akin to flash photography, which softens the effects of natural light, levelling everything under the same strong glow.
Another trademark of Ozias’s work is a recurring pattern of spatial organisation of the figures: nearly all of them seem to be following stage directions or choreography, even as they are obviously static. They are like frozen glimpses of restless situations, where it is impossible to know how they will evolve or resolve. It is as if the paintings were suggesting a plot, demanding that viewers project their own worldview onto the artist’s work. The environments that surround these figures frame the scenes with open spaces and uncertain borders. Ozias’s paintings are drafts of the real, simultaneously true and false.
"...his work eludes the conceptual and historical indices that dominated the museums, academia, and criticism of the time..."
Ozias worked during a period in which few black artists sat at the high table of modern and contemporary art in Brazil, a consequence of the structural racism that has shaped the country since the beginning of European colonisation in the 16th century. Moreover, his work eludes the conceptual and historical indices that dominated the museums, academia, and criticism of the time. Creators like Ozias—black, poor, and uneducated in the hegemonic norms of making and understanding art—were destined, at best, to be deemed primitive, naïve, or popular artists, if their value was acknowledged at all by critics and institutions. However, this did not prevent his work from being recognised and acclaimed outside such institutional environments, as it has been now for years.
The fact that Ozias, and several other artists like him, who suffered lack of institutional validation, are now having their works legitimised in their own terms, signals a recent and significant change in the visual arts in Brazil. This change, emerging from broad social demands, has gradually consolidated and elevated (despite conservative resistance) a new generation of black artists who have redefined, from a shared set of ethical and aesthetic principles, what Brazilian contemporary art can be. It is only with the vocal condemnation of the racism that historically permeated Brazil (and that includes the art world), and with growing antiracist struggle, that the new appreciation of Ozias's work as a pictorial translation of the country's social and affective landscape becomes possible. In that sense, perhaps it is one can say that although Ozias’s work precedes by decades that of the young black artists in Brazil, in political and public terms, it is a product of this current generation. Time overlaps with itself when the power of invention overcomes racism.
1 Terreiros are places of worship in the Candomblé tradition.
2 The festas de São João, or festas juninas, are celebrations that take place in and around 24 June, during the Brazilian winter, involving dance, games, bonfires, mulled wine, and abundant food.