“My name is Victor Henrique Fidelis, and I am a visual artist from São Paulo, Brazil, with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo. Self-taught, I have been developing my artistic language since I was 15 years old, using drawing techniques such as graphite, colored pencils, ballpoint and felt-tip pens, and, more recently, acrylic paint, which is currently my main technique. My contact with the visual arts, especially the two-dimensional ones (painting, drawing, engraving) came from my family environment, and I was introduced to artists such as Di Cavalvanti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Portinari in my early childhood, by my aunt and mother, who both graduated in Arts. In addition to these painters, there is a range of graffiti artists. This imagery research recently became a final undergraduate thesis that focuses on locating my own production with other contributions to Afro-Brazilian Art, finding common thematic parallels. I explore the issues that intercept Brazilian rationalized bodies, from the discomforts of racial relations in society to their consequences, from the search for self, for self-esteem and image awareness that is common to black people, to the pluralities and potentialities of black Brazilians, using the memories of interracial relationships, of encounters and disagreements as a healing for this entire process. It is through deformed self-portraits, the use of my own face, my own forms in different proportions, that I exercise the multiplicities possible to us. Portraying black bodies is an exercise in self-knowledge in my work. The faces and forms that I draw come from my closest references, from the memory of the bodies that surround me, which are very much my forms as well. Understanding what makes us a group, the variety among these forms, the textures, colors, particularities and common traits, is to reflect on which narratives were imposed on us, so that we can then create new places.”
