OAF Curated Space | Follow My Moves - Program - New York

Follow My Moves is, by intention, an invitation to dance—not as a physical act, but as a metaphor for a dynamic, evolving, and continuous structure of thought. Within this framework, the exhibition provides a substantial glimpse into the intricate interplay of artistic and educational practices in Brazil, spanning from the 1950s to the present. By showcasing the richness of manifold artistic expressions across this vast and diverse country, the exhibition highlights the role of visual transmissions and oral history in cultivating a living creative legacy. It presents works by artists considered masters in the Brazilian context, both for their profound artistic practices and their significant pedagogical contributions.

These artists, fueled by the dynamics of traditional knowledge, reinterpreted established aesthetic systems through direct dialogue with academic art, extending their legacies through generous transmission networks. Often categorized under outdated labels such as self-taught or arte popular, they navigate learning systems that diverge from standardized Eurocentric and hegemonic artistic and educational traditions. This divergence does not diminish the rigor or depth of their ideas and influence; on the contrary, it amplifies them. Their practices transcend stylistic and categorical limitations, opening pathways to expansive frameworks of knowledge, time, subjectivity, and cultural transmission. Through initiatives such as Chico da Silva’s Pirambu Workshop, Maria Lira Marques’ artistic advocacy in the Vale do Jequitinhonha region, and Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato’s enduring aesthetic impact on his hometown of Belo Horizonte, these artists have left indelible marks on Brazilian art.

The cultural hybridisms reflected in their works extend beyond their immediate communities, embodying Brazil’s broader sociohistorical dynamics. Rooted in the influences of Indigenous traditions, the African diaspora, and European dialogues—whether shaped by colonial impositions or the artists’ own intentions—these works mirror the complexities of the Global South while remaining attuned to the specificities of Brazil’s diverse regions and the unique subjectivities of its artists.

Challenging hegemonic norms and rigid historiographical categories, these artists employ alternative forms of education to develop innovative visual languages. Their creations probe intricate relationships with time, history, and corporeal agency, offering profound tools for addressing contemporary challenges. By systematically revising dominant approaches to ecology, society, heritage, art, cosmologies, and spirituality, they propose a transformative epistemological shift. Through spiraling, non-linear methodologies, their works encourage a view of history that seamlessly intertwines the past and the future, reaffirming the enduring vitality of ancestral traditions.

Follow: transmission, legacy, and time

Follow, in the imperative, stands as an active invitation to teach and learn simultaneously, a call to transmit traditions built through dialogue. A limited, albeit widespread, historiographical apparatus that reads hybridisms as deflections from the canon in a tone of error would understand these exchange-stimulated accumulations as deviant forces toward an impure style. These aggregations, however, complexify and broaden flows, creating circles that play harmonic music but with singular timbres, instruments, and voices.

To follow does not imply subservience but rather affirms the continuity of teachings through rupture, transformation, and renewal. Rubem Valentim's work exemplifies this by presenting an abstract geometric repertoire that reinterprets African visual systems—from representations of orishas to textile patterns—filtered through Brazilian Neo-Concretism and a desire to link abstraction to spiritual and sacred aspects. Similarly, Miriam Inez da Silva's wood paintings depict ubiquitous and allegorical scenes experienced in the Brazilian countryside, such as religious ceremonies and popular festivities. These figurative narratives, built in a central perspective, are enriched by geometric structures that consistently frame the edges of the paintings and a white background where the characters converge. These elements reveal how the artist incorporated her unique interpretations of references gained through academic formation in painting and visual arts, as well as her participation in renowned institutional exhibitions.

My: subjectivity, collectivity, and style

By centering the focus of artistic analysis on my movements, an ambiguous endeavor is undertaken—one of mutual interaction between the individual and the community. By claiming possession in the first person singular, it asserts a complete subjectivity historically plundered from people who, by their practices and very existence, challenged imperialist molds upheld as canon. However, individual understanding cannot exist without collective consideration: the movements of one echo and merge with those of many who came before, coexist in the present, and will continue into the future. Therefore, the notion of individual possession dissolves as it moves through the air, recognizing that collaborative networks are essential for imagining a sociohistorically sustainable life.

At the intersection of subjectivity, collectivity, and style, questions of authorship and authenticity arise, as do notions of intellectual ownership, commodification, and individual genius rooted in European Enlightenment ideals. The methods of operation, thinking, and production employed by the Brazilian artists showcased in this exhibition testify to the presence of alternative agents in forming a network of expression that transcends individualism and embodies an expanded subjectivity. These dynamics yield outcomes as diverse as their origins, exposing the inefficacy of a scientificist genealogy that seeks to establish a purity of descent through artificial flows, thereby attempting to confine complex networks. Collective transcreation, driven by repertoires that merge and interweave, generates delirious, overflowing, and fluid expressions, defying rigid categorizations and celebrating the richness of interconnected creativity.

Moves: epistemology, circularity, and hybridism

The works of these artists reveal that the moves of transmission and influence they engage with are neither linear nor unidirectional. Instead, they follow intricate sociohistorical contexts, underscoring Brazil’s identity as a historical crossroads of migrations and diasporas. These dynamics include hybrid cultural matrices that existed among Indigenous groups before colonization and, after the 16th century, absorbed diverse European and Afro-diasporic influences, for example. This process remains vibrant today, with increasingly diverse groups and traditions contributing to a rich cultural tapestry. For instance, in the 1960s, Chico da Silva collaborated with other painters as his assistants in his Pirambu workshop. These collaborators, granted a degree of autonomy, evolved and expanded upon the master’s artistic legacy, creating a distinctive visual language rooted in subjective expressions while maintaining connections to a shared cosmological and pictorial universe.

Akin to circularity and cultural hybridism, Zimar preserves through his works the vibrant, syncretic tradition of bumba-meu-boi, a cultural and religious celebration from Brazil’s northeast during São João festivities. His work incorporates Cazumbá, a masked entity of Bantu origin that also embodies Indigenous symbolic and ritualistic elements. This enigmatic figure transcends binaries such as human and animal, male and female, terrifying and enchanting. In parallel, moved by principles that also inhabit the threshold zone, Francisco Brennand’s ceramics offer profound meditations on human existence, exploring themes and elements he considered fundamental—earth, fire, air, sex, myth, and life—through forms imbued with symbolic and elemental resonance. The transmission of knowledge, therefore, operates as a dynamic and living force, interweaving systems of tradition and understanding grounded in multicultural complexity.

Mateus Nunes

Mateus Nunes (b. 1997, Belém, Brazil) is a curator, art critic, and researcher from the Brazilian Amazon, based in São Paulo. Nunes holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Lisbon and is a postdoctoral fellow on History of Art and Architecture at Universidade de São Paulo, with previous postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Foundation and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In the intersections of text and image, he is interested in non-hegemonic systems of organizing, perceiving and understanding time, history, and influence. Having collaborated with galleries and museums worldwide as coordinating courses at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, his writings are published in Artforum, ArtReview, Carla, Flash Art, Frieze, Terremoto, and academic journals.

OAF Curated Space | Follow My Moves

Curated by Mateus Nunes

February 27 – March 2, 2025

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