Antonio Obá, 2025. Terreiro situation: accession

Upon entering the exhibition of Brasília-based artist Antonio Obá at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, visitors walk alongside Sansevieria (also known as Mother-in-law's tongue or Saint Barbara's sword) and other similar plants. These healing and protective plants, used in Afro-Brazilian traditions, prepare visitors for an exhibition surrounded by elements of good fortune, ritual, and prayer.

Titled "Birth," the exhibition occupies the entire gallery with mostly previously unseen works. According to Obá, the collection presented stems from a large selection within a research process that attempts to expand his self-references into a broader experience. He explains: “It’s a journey. From this birth to culminating in this outcome, which is death, and the various deaths we end up having along the way. Why not celebrate these moments? We usually only celebrate what is good, but why not also celebrate what is death and, above all, what is doubt?”

For the artist, the works on display are “ways of ritualizing, mythologizing, and celebrating these various paths and detours.” After passing through the portal of healing plants, the visitor encounters two wooden columns, or two pillories, covered in nails. While in one of the columns the nails are pierced, in the other they are bristling in the opposite position. “When I conceived this image, this inevitable aspect of life came to mind: that we constantly go through both hurting and being hurt. This is independent of our will; sometimes we don't want to hurt, and inevitably it will happen at some point. As will being hurt. So, I think it's a way of placing these two ambivalent situations on the same level,” reflects the artist. In the center of the two pillories is a bronze head, from which hangs a plumb line pointing to gambling and luck. Below the plumb line, on the ground, is a central Exu bottle, a ritual object that complements the idea of ​​chance.

 

In his larger canvases, Obá tells personal stories that achieve a "symbolic experience of the sacred," in the artist's words, when presented to others. In one work, for example, he was struggling to find a solution. One day in his studio, his assistant shared a childhood memory: when she visited her cousins ​​in the countryside, her aunt, trying to keep her mischievous children from leaving the house, would leave them naked. The strategy failed, and they would go out and get into trouble anyway, only naked. This image appealed to Obá, who reflected on this life force that makes children throw themselves into life. And so, he finished the composition of Situação terreiro: estripulia (Terreiro Situation: Mischief).

For the series of small canvases dedicated to tarot, he based his work on the 22 major arcana of the Tarot of Marseilles. Using gold leaf and a mix of techniques, the paintings take on an air of magic with the artist's interpretations, who, with each reading, sought to understand periods of life as a way to guide it. “There was indeed this deepening, not only intellectually, but also experientially: I would draw the tarot cards and internalize that process. And this ended up appearing in dreams. I think reading Jung makes that possible, right? It leaves a very fertile field for the imagination. So, I had very strong, very powerful dreams. I think that, in a formal sense, many things became better organized.”

At the back of the gallery is a previously unseen installation that he had long desired. In a red room with a cracked, beaten earth floor, there are gilded bronze sieves with red eggs on top. Eggs, a symbol of fertility, appear frequently in the works present. Above them, columns of cowrie shells float around the room. This ascension of the cowrie shells emerges as a territory of spiritual elevation. “It’s almost like an invitation: ‘Since I’m here, I’m going to try to improve this existence.’ It’s like that phrase: leave the place you came from at least a little tidier, or if not the same, never worse,” he comments.

Throughout the year, Obá dedicated himself to producing the works in this exhibition. After spending 8 to 10 hours with his hand on the brush, when night fell, his process of mental relief was, curiously, drawing. Without using external references, all the artist knew about this process was that he would draw bodies, which are already part of his research, but nothing more. The result was always a surprise: "it was like giving vent to desire." Seven of these results appear side by side on one of the walls of the exhibition.

The image for the 2024 installation Ka'a porá stemmed from an ordinary experience: Obá was cycling through the Cerrado in Brasília when he noticed some burnt tree trunks, which were not new to him, but this time took on a different dimension. From the image of these trunks, he reflected on "this resilient process of nature renewing itself through cycles. What was dry and appeared burnt, dead, turned green again with the first rain," he recounts.

For him, this is a lesson that nature constantly teaches us to shape our own lives: "How many times do we feel extinguished, pruned, annihilated, and find ourselves in a situation of needing to renew ourselves?" he asks. "I think it's almost a process, in this cyclical idea, of trying to become one with nature. These renewal processes that life proposes until the very end. Until the very end, there are several endings and restarts," he concludes.


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