Through Afro-Brazilian history, artist Antonio Obá discovers his own story.
Then he took up the practice of capoeira himself. “It was, in a way, determinative,” said Obá, “it was a corporeal relation that was awakened in me. I was raised in a Christian tradition where you recognize your body not by moving it but by denying it. To start capoeira helped me to not only recognize and understand my body but the other person’s body dancing with me. It was putting myself in a vulnerable position on purpose.
He was also reclaiming his African heritage in a society that has sought to dilute Black culture. “I was taking back an ancestral body from this tradition that acknowledges the body, and also the other body, in an interplay,” he said. “I felt a need to change the focus of my research to look at my origins.”Raised as a Catholic boy who played music in church and “almost became a priest,” he had been christened Antonio de Paula.
He had found his subject. “I began diving into the genealogy of my family, coming out of a small familial circle to reach a larger realm related to the generational history of Brazil and the issue of miscegenation,” he said. “I arrived at a more complete picture of nineteenth century eugenics, the persecution of Afro-Brazilian traditions and the overall violence—not only physical but symbolic—on the Black body.” He painted figures that were unmistakably Black.
He said he values the immediacy, compressed time frame and “surprise element” of performance, but the practice of painting also delivers the unexpected. “I never have a predefined idea of what will happen in the end,” he said. “During the process of painting, the image will reveal itself.”One of the paintings he made in New York started with photographs that he found by chance. It depicts a Black man dreaming in a hammock, his face recognizably Obá’s own.
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