Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias (1940–2011)
By Simon Grant
If Carnival is the most potent marker of the extraordinarily rich Afro-Brazilian heritage, then its most spectacular symbol is the sambadrome, the giant stadiums that have become the epicentre of the yearly festival occurring over the four days leading up to Lent. Hundreds of samba ‘schools,’ rooted in different communities, compete with each other, dressed in flamboyant costumes and showing off their drumming, marching, and above all dancing. The parade moves down the central route through the sambadrome in front of tens of thousands of live spectators, while millions of TV viewers tune in across South America and beyond. The scale is immense. The Sambódromo Marquês de Sapucaí in Rio de Janeiro, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1984, is over 2,300 feet long, and during Carnival the place is alive in a sea of dazzling colour and pulsating, rhythmic music.
Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias was captivated by the carnival parades that he saw, most likely in Rio, where he lived much of his adult life, which became the subject of many of his paintings. Reflecting the joyous collective energy of the performers and crowds alike, he managed to be as much a participant as a voyeur, painting the performers of the samba groups in close-up, as if standing in front of them. We see the performers rendered as tightly knit rows of colour, onto which he details individual faces, both black and white, their eyes wide open, the mouths often agape—singing perhaps.
Each scene is different, and he pays attention to the detail of these processions. In works such as Desfile no sambódromo (Parade at the sambadrome) (2001) and A escola vai passar (The samba school will parade) (2001) he depicts the female flagbearer (porta-bandeira) with her male dancing partner (mestre-sala) at the front of their group. In Ala das Baianas (2001) he paints women spinning around in long hoop skirts, an homage to the old Bahian ‘samba aunts’ of the early twentieth century, while A escola desfilando (The school’s parade) (2001) includes the figure of the destaque, often a celebrity who stands alone on a raised float. The central figures are flanked on each side by the rows of heads (but no bodies) of the spectators in the stands, giving each picture a highly charged atmosphere.
It is unsurprising that Ozias would choose samba as a subject. He knew and understood its roots. It was in his blood. With its merging of Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies and Catholic festivals, Carnival has become an important form of cultural validation of the Afro-Brazilian heritage. The songs that are sung at these events, whose topics range from stories of Brazilian national heroes to local social issues, illustrate a visceral living history that mirrors Ozias’s own biography.
"Reflecting the joyous collective energy of the performers and crowds alike, he managed to be as much a participant as a voyeur, painting the performers of the samba groups in close-up, as if standing in front of them."
Ozias was born into poverty in the small agricultural town of Eugenópolis, in Minas Gerais state. One of ten children, he was already working in the fields by the age of four, and there he experienced the sights and sounds of rural life among the predominantly Afro-Brazilian population. These would later make their way into his paintings, not just the memory of the coffee and sugar plantations that dominated the local economy—as in No campo (In the fields) (2000)—but also religious festivals like São João—Festa de São João) (Festival of Saint John) (2002)—and the Folia de Reis, capturing the community’s diverse beliefs and traditions.
Ozias’s family later moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he took numerous jobs with the Brazilian state railway. After a colleague noticed his caricature drawings of staff, he was asked to illustrate a book, Woods of the Amazon: Identified in 100 Species, published by the company, which he filled with a rainbow of colours. It was a turning point in his life, and at the age of forty-six he discovered a passion for painting. Without any training or traditional materials, he created his pictures, using chewed matchsticks, his fingers and fingernails, and even his teeth. Those who saw his work were deeply impressed, and by 1987 he’d had his first solo exhibition. The word spread, and in the following years he would exhibit in important group exhibitions in Brazil and Europe.
He painted a wide variety of subjects, often drawing from his lived experience, memory, or Brazilian colonial history. One key strand is his religious pictures, including his series of paintings depicting the Candomblé faith. Candomblé is an African diasporic religion that began in Brazil during the nineteenth century, emerging through the fusion of several traditional religions of West Africa (mainly Yoruba, Gbe, and Bantu) with the Roman Catholic teachings of the Portuguese colonialists, which one might compare to its ‘sister’ religions, Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería. It is characterised by the invocation and celebration of venerated spirits (known as orixás) who are believed to possess initiated people into a trance-like state of singing and dancing.
Ozias made many paintings depicting the characters and characteristics of Candomblé. In A seção (The section) (1999), he depicts the figure Omolú, the god known for healing diseases entering the Candomblé terreiro (place of worship). He appears wearing his mask and raffia cloak that represents his own struggles as well as the overall hardships of life on Earth. He is guided by two iyalorixá (priestesses), their rank denoted by the crisp white clothes they wear, and below, lying prostrate in darker clothes, are the other initiates. Other orixás feature in his Candomblé pictures, often surrounded by priests and priestesses in varying states of song, trance, or veneration.
“...he visualised what for many was a benign reality in Brazilian society—the syncretism of distinct religious approaches that emphasized similarity rather than difference...”
Ozias would have grown up with Candomblé and would have experienced its wider acceptance over the years, especially in the wake of President Getúlio Vargas’s attempt to unite the nation through the idea of brasilidade (Brazilianness). One consequence of this was greater religious freedom, which saw the rapid rise in Brazilians following faiths beyond Catholicism. Ozias would take part in this change, becoming a minister of the Assembly of God, an evangelical Pentecostal denomination that emphasises the core doctrines of baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, and divine healing. Along with building a temple for his new congregation, Ozias developed his subject matter in line with his calling. The figure of the devil began to appear in many works, such as Oração (The prayer) (undated), functioning not just as a religious symbol, but also as an agent of fear and an instrument of pastoral power that typified the faith that Ozias was practising. More subtly, he visualised what for many was a benign reality in Brazilian society—the syncretism of distinct religious approaches that emphasised similarity rather than difference (helped by the fact that Catholic saints are matched with orixás and both Candomblé and the Assembly of God place great emphasis on the search for individual salvation). In his most positive painting on this subject, Dupla proteção (Double protection) (2000), he depicts two angels in white who hover over a seated group of Candomblé practitioners.
During his life Ozias would be recognised as a distinguished ‘naïf’ artist by the art establishment, a term that was also used to describe other great Brazilian self-taught artists of the time, including Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (1935–1974), Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt (1919–1977), and José Antonio da Silva (1909–1996). Like Ozias, they used vibrant, bold colours and depicted scenes from their lives in a direct way. Yet this problematic term, with its paternalistic and reductive overtones, automatically set them apart from the more academically trained artists, and for a while their art was at best regarded as a romanticised, folkloric chronicle of Brazilian rural life, and at worst, in more privileged Brazilian art circles, as ‘primitive’, rough, and unskilled.
However, as early as the 1960s there were figures who pushed for a more inclusive approach and against the government’s reluctance to recognise the African cultural heritage of the country. The influential human rights activist, politician, pan-Africanist, and artist Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011), who was himself a painter working with symbols and ideas of Candomblé, regularly criticised the Brazilian government for the lack of Black Brazilian artists represented in Brazilian institutions, and had, among other projects, proposed the founding of a Black art museum as early as 1968. His voice, among others, led to a growing interest in Brazil’s African heritage, dissemination of knowledge on the subject, and a 're-Africanisation' movement.
Nascimento’s seminal 1980 essay ‘Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative’ was his defining statement, asserting ‘the urgent necessity of Black people to defend their survival and assure their very existence as human beings.’ He named his ideology ‘quilombismo,’ derived from the term quilombos, communities of escaped slaves that existed in Brazil from the early sixteenth century to abolition of slavery in 1888. In this light, Ozias’s art can been, from the outset, as being as much a political act as personal expression, and this is why his art matters. It was something that the enlightened artist, curator, and museologist Emanuel Araujo understood when he curated the exhibition A Mao Afro-Brasileria (The Afro-Brazilian Hand) at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in 1987. It was a watershed moment for Araujo’s inclusive approach to artists like Ozias, and it marked the moment that the term ‘Afro-Brazilian’ came into wide use. The exhibition happened while Ozias’s work was beginning to be exhibited, and this opened the way for his becoming rightly recognised as an important voice in the history of twentieth-century Brazilian art.