Rio de Janeiro, 1950s and 1960s. The "marvelous city" was undergoing changes: it was becoming increasingly gentrified, excluding the people who built it and turning into a stage for social and ideological conflicts.
This is the setting for some of the works of Paulo Pedro Leal, a self-taught artist who, despite the importance of his work in portraying the contradictions of modernization in Rio de Janeiro, lived on the margins of the institutional art circuit and fell into relative oblivion after his death, like many artists of Black and humble origins of the time.
To rectify this error, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo inaugurated “Tragic Suburb,” an exhibition dedicated to revisiting his work and presenting it to a wider audience. Curated by Pollyana Quintella and Renato Menezes, the exhibition brings together approximately 50 paintings that condense his diversity.
“PPL [as the artist signed his work and became known] produced a very original testimony to the transformations of his time,” says curator Quintella. “His works contain an outline of intense social denunciation and chronicle. He captured the atmosphere of this Brazilian modernity, from the first to the second half of the 20th century, with a sense of composition and a particular use of color and, at the same time, an elaborate social critique.”
In his work, Leal makes inequalities explicit instead of hiding them. In "The Captain's House" (1950), for example, we see a showy mansion that contrasts with other dwellings he depicted. With luxurious pillars and vaults, one can observe, to the left of the building, a Black person serving a couple dressed in pomp.
What interested PPL was crisis, confrontation, turmoil, the breakdown of the modern social pact. Shipwrecks, naval battles, Umbanda rituals, bar fights, brothels, and carnivals were some of his favorite themes, in which social and racial tensions in the capital of Rio de Janeiro can be observed—a large part of the scenes were imagined by PPL, based on reading newspapers and observing illustrated magazines.
The exhibition synthesizes the artist's three major themes. The first room presents scenes of sociability—conflicts, such as bar fights, or communion, such as weddings. Next to it, a group reflects how PPL interpreted classic painting genres, such as naval battles and shipwrecks—a consequence of the artist's obsession with the First World War—as well as landscapes and still lifes. Finally, the third room features works with scenes of collectivity, in which bodies are in a kind of collective enjoyment, suspending the established order: Carnival, scenes in brothels, syncretic religious rites, and popular festivals.
Quintella highlights the artist's creativity and attention to detail, whether in a landscape or a scene with multiple characters. In "Modern Surgery," he depicts an organ transplant operation. At the time, this procedure was just beginning to be performed. PPL paints the moment with fantastical contours: the nurses look like ghosts, with white masks covering their entire faces.
The curator highlights how PPL placed Black and white people, poor and rich, men and women, powerful and vulnerable people in conflict. She compares him to Heitor dos Prazeres, his contemporary—in his work, we see a diversity of cheerful characters in scenes that promise a kind of social agreement. “PPL shows the other side of this—conflict is the protagonist all the time, whether in a shipwreck during wartime or in a bar fight in Lapa. Everything is out of control, escaping the idea of the modern civilizational pact.”
One of his best-known works is “Drowning of Beggars” (1965), the only known painting to depict the biggest scandal of state violence in Rio de Janeiro before the Military Dictatorship. Carlos Lacerda, then governor of the state, ordered the Begging Repression Service to kidnap homeless people and throw them into the Guandu River, about 100 kilometers from the capital of Rio de Janeiro. PPL paints people detained, awaiting their death; others, facing the river, threatened with weapons; and then, already being dragged by the waterway. Alongside the work, the viewer can see excerpts from newspapers that covered the case and that probably inspired the compositions.
According to Quintella, his most popular works were the “macumba scenes”: in one of the few interviews he gave, Leal stated: “I paint everything, I know how to do a landscape or a portrait, but nobody buys them. The Afro-Brazilian motifs are more profitable because they arouse the curiosity of foreigners, among whom I always find customers.” In the same report, a rare photograph of the artist was featured in the newspaper. TomorrowHe receives a book of paintings from the critic and cultural attaché of the United States embassy, Marcus Gordon Brow.
Leal was the son of the Bahian couple Marcelino Pedro Leal and Afra Maria de Albuquerque, and grandson of people from Maranhão. His parents probably migrated to Rio de Janeiro in search of better opportunities, like many other Afro-descendant families at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. He was raised by an uncle, Luiz Joaquim de Araújo, who introduced him to the Jeje-Nagô rites.
In his landscapes, he frequently depicted the encroachment of the suburbs on the countryside, a reflection of his own life trajectory: Leal was born in 1900 in Morro da Viúva, between the neighborhoods of Botafogo and Flamengo. But, with the real estate speculation in the South Zone, he was forced to settle in Coelho da Rocha, a neighborhood in São João do Meriti, where he set up a studio and a religious space.
Due to this "double life," between art and the knowledge of Umbanda, PPL became known as a "spiritual painter": when someone sought him out, it could be either to buy a painting or to have a consultation. Besides his vocation as a priest, he held many jobs throughout his life: he was a domestic worker, a stevedore, worked at the Central do Brasil train station, in a brewery, as a bricklayer's assistant, collaborated on floats and body painting for the Coelho da Rocha samba school, painted murals and signs, and for many years sold his works and toys, made of wood and cardboard, at the Passeio Público in downtown Rio de Janeiro.
It was on the sidewalk of the Passeio Público that, in 1953, Leal met the Romanian art dealer and gallery owner Jean Boghici, who propelled his career. He boasted of having sold "Verdun," a portrait of the bloodiest battle of the First World War, to Lygia Clark, who supposedly hung the work in her living room. Boghici organized the artist's only solo exhibition during his lifetime, at the historic Petite Galerie, and sent the painting Dragon of the Orient to the National Salon, which received the acquisition prize and is now part of the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts.
Quintella states that it is likely that his earliest easel paintings, made with rudimentary materials, have not survived; and that the works we know of are from after their "discovery" by Boghici.
The curator rejects the labels of "primitive" and "naive" artist that PPL carried for many decades: his works evoke a critique. He had a vibrant social scene; moreover, he was interested in the genres of art historiography and interpreted, in his own way, the works of great masters.
“For a long time, we attributed naiveté or docility to self-taught painters because they hadn't gone through the art system. But he read his time critically, producing a testimony not only with an authorial gesture, but also with a great deal of political awareness,” says Quintella. “PPL was an artist with the ability not to camouflage conflicts, but rather to maintain them, making this the strength of his work. To call him a naive"To consider someone naive or docile is a very serious mistake. The contribution of your work is precisely to go in the opposite direction of that."
Even in paintings where he depicted something far removed from his reality—such as the conflicts of the First World War—PPL engaged with this suburban tragedy, says the curator. “We see people throwing themselves into the sea, devoured by sea monsters… It’s a world without redemption, where no agreement is possible. But, at the same time, it’s not a nihilistic reading—it has a dimension of imagination, of ritual, of myth, of collectivity.”
Paulo Pedro Leal died in 1968 in São João do Meriti. Decades after his death, Boghici published "Paulo Pedro Leal Pintor Espiritual" (Paulo Pedro Leal, Spiritual Painter), the result of a 1999 exhibition dedicated to his work. More recently, he participated in the 2025 exhibition "Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration 1960-1970" at the Pinacoteca, also curated by Pollyana Quintella.
Alongside the exhibition, the institution is publishing a catalog with previously unpublished essays that situate Leal within his historical context, as well as a revised chronology of the artist's career—assembled from an effort to fill in gaps in his biography.
