Batinga; critical essay by Marina Schiesari
10.19-11.23.2024

Batinga; critical essay by Marina Schiesari

Victor Fidelis 10.19-11.23.2024
texto crítico: Marina Schiesari

Up the hill with amber and indigo colours on their heads, subjects come and go, without slackening their pace or their breathing. They go on excitedly, thinking about what to do when they get home: gather the family, have a beer, welcome some neighbours, play with siblings, watch a novela or study. This was Victor Fidelis’ daily life in Rua Batinga, Vila Mazzei, in São Paulo’s North Zone, between 2003 and 2013.

With a nostalgic bittersweet flavour, his grandmother’s house brought together joys and sorrows when it was inhabited by the family and their sporadic parties in the large back yard. Birthdays, Christmases, New Years and the matriarch’s events brought together relatives and family members. It was an adult socialisation of accustomed affections. Combined with subtleties that could only be noticed in close proximity, the imaginative eyes met the personalities that they lacked on a daily basis in other environments.

Batinga, Victor Fidelis’ first solo exhibition, depicts encounters marked by the earthy colours of late spring and summer afternoons. Young black bodies, dressed in after-work or pre-celebration clothes, occupy these paintings. Always close to or inside the house, they reflect the encounters idealised by Fidelis in his youth, limited to the domestic environment and with little contact with his community. These are images constructed by the artist that bring with them cultural, temporal and local signs linked to contemporary Afro-Brazilian collectivity.

The volumetrically rounded bodies and faces inspired by the artist’s own countenance carry values and detail equivalent to the clothes and spaces embraced. Elements such as the vase by Alvar Aalto, the Mocho stool by Sergio Rodrigues, the hydraulic tile floor and the aluminium shutters hint at his training as an architect. The flowing garments belonging to the it-favela scene – so named by Tasha & Tracie* for the combination of streetwear with accessories and vintage pieces – date back to the time when the artist’s father, a textile sales representative, dressed his children for his product displays.

From drawing to canvas, there is a clear aesthetic collision between two great references in oil paint: Di Cavalcanti, with his robust figures and distorted perspectives, and Heitor dos Prazeres, with his vivid colours and clothes that give dignity to those depicted – both artists from the first half of the 20th century were portraitists of their experiences; however, they were classified in different categories due to the social markers of differences embedded in that period. Even though modernism sought to break with academic art and, to this end, valued elements of popular culture, this was not without contradictions. Imbued with a similar figurative corpus, Di Cavalcanti was seen as an emblematic modern artist and Heitor dos Prazeres as naïf (naive), categories loaded with asymmetries and prejudices.

Despite the notable contribution of Heitor dos Prazeres, Wilson Tibério, Maria Auxiliadora, Paulo Pedro Leal, Madalena Santos Reinbolt, among others from the same period, the dominant Brazilian artistic representation remained rich and crossed by the experience of whiteness, objectifying cultural exoticism and the scars of slavery. 

Aware of the erasures and violence contained in this national formation, Fidelis produces with intentionality and critical thinking, as he himself describes it, ‘a considerable tool for drawing direct parallels to the modernists, especially by understanding that a large part of the image of the black Brazilian, citizen, freedman, inserting himself into society, was constructed in these artistic currents, which reinforced stereotypes, both positively and negatively’, and for this reason, ‘expanding notions of what it is to be a black Brazilian is an indispensable step towards humanisation’.

Fidelis’ temporal displacement allows him to recapitulate the subtleties present in the popular art of his naïve masters, which is now glamourised as pop. As an example of this, on the canvases in the exhibition, the booted feet of his characters – even when relaxed at home – remind him and others of today’s rights as undeniable fruits of yesterday’s resistance, as Ricardo Aleixo rightly contextualises in ‘Álbum de Família’:

My father saw Casablanca three times (twice
in the cinema and once on TV). My grandfather worked at the mouth of the mine. My great-grandfather
was, at the very least, a trusted slave.

Although 136 years have passed since abolition, in the poem, the activities of the three generations gradually intensify towards the exploration of the past and thus trace the recent conquest of leisure. For this reason, the relaxation represented by Victor Fidelis – relaxed bodies, bags thrown on the sofa, drinks and tropical fruit – becomes a silent manifesto. As he says: ‘Portraying black people at rest, enjoying triviality and leisure, has been an important motif in my work, precisely because I understand that there are remnants of macro issues in these banal interpersonal exchanges.’ 

bell hooks, in her book All About Love – New Perspectives, discusses about this: ‘The presence of pain in our lives is not an indication of dysfunction. Not all families are dysfunctional. And while it has been crucial for collective self-recovery that we have exposed and will continue to expose dysfunction, it is equally important to recognise and celebrate its absence.’ Therefore, the way in which Fidelis chooses to portray the body at rest becomes an attempt to remove it from the structural support to which it is tensioned on a daily basis.

The collective trauma permeated in her research and the representations proposed show the search for possible wounds and cures based on the experience of racialised cycles. In this context, Cida Bento, following the logic of mutual support, recounts her personal life, where she came from and where she has been, to present the book Pacto da Branquitude. As the first person in her family to complete undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees throughout her career, she shared the issues and strategies of the workplace with her siblings. ‘In our family, we didn’t have references of professionals who held command positions in large organisations or the structure to respond to the demands of spaces where only the elite had been. (…) The effort to overcome barriers took place between us, as we have seen in so many other poor, peripheral families.’ The organisational barriers to which Cida refers apply equally to the artistic field, for example when referring to the asymmetries between Di Cavalcanti and Heitor dos Prazeres: their differences are marked by race, class and social relations.

In Rua Batinga, the houses and their rooms, made up of cobogós, floors, posts, live fences and metal chairs, establish connections between Fidelis’ paintings, giving the feeling of neighbourliness. Although he deals with apparently banal everyday elements, the artist challenges an iconography that is often associated with subalternity. By inverting the imagery and presenting idle moments in the lives of young black protagonists gathered in the same social context, Fidelis broadens the representation of these individuals, especially in the artistic sphere. This approach not only celebrates the right to subjectivity, but broadens the experiences and imagery within a reinvigorated community. 

 

* Tasha & Tracie brand: Expensive Shit.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALEIXO, R. Too heavy for the wind. São Paulo: Todavia, 2018.

BENTO, C. O pacto da branquitude. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.

FIDELIS, V. H. C. B. Approaches to black representations in the history of Brazilian art. 2022. 104 f. Final course work (Degree in Architecture and Urbanism) – University of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2022. Available at: http://tfg.fau.usp.br/victor-henrique-da-cruz-bueno-fidelis/. Accessed on: 15 October 2024.

HOOKS, B. All about love. São Paulo: Elefante, 2021.

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