Thiago Martins de Melo was born in 1981, in São Luís do Maranhão, where he lives and works. The artist has participated in several residencies in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he is currently involved in a project with Rigo Campuzano, a young Mexican curator.
Thiago's production is characterized by the viscerality of his painting and his research in the field of psychology and religions of resistance to colonizers, especially the Spanish and Portuguese.
We publish below two texts referring to works exhibited in Spain and at the stand of Lima Galeria, in Maranhão, during SP-Arte, in São Paulo.
“Brazilian Quimbanda, among many other currents and resistance cults in Brazil, has its genesis in the clash of Christian violence under the sign of the god crucified over the people of the land today called Brazil and the people of Africa who crossed the Atlantic under iron and colonizer's fire.
The cult of the deified ancestors of indigenous warriors, enslaved people and exiles of the Holy Office found fertile land in Brazil for the maintenance of their powers through syncretism and the Macaias, the cure, the curse, revenge through spirituality reached the diabolical nickname. The Sabbath cult found its alliance with the spirits of the forest and ancestral voduns.
Brazilian Quimbanda, as a true left-hand cult, assumed cabalistic, gnostic, anti-demiurgical concepts that live up to its deific masks of association with the Devil and also with the great lord of the paths, the orixá Exu, from whom the powerful dead borrow their nickname. .
Quimbanda is the cult of the poisoning of the Colonel, the decapitation of the Nazarene, of individual freedom, of the empowerment of the disgraced, of honor to those who died in the fires of the inquisition, the executioner's axe, the gallows, the steel, the bullet, the hunger , in torture and who, having experienced human pain, deified themselves on the adversary path to guide their incarnated brothers. Laroyê Exu, Exu is Mojubá. (TMM)
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“The Magician is the beginning of the action in the spiritual journey of tarot. All the tools that symbolize the four elements are at your disposal, including the table that has one of its legs as support. The 22 arcana of the tarot have their correlation with the tree of life, the magician would be the 11th path, that of luminous intelligence, Keter-Hockmah.
The tarot has an unknown origin, the oldest myth relates its origin to the Egyptian tradition, from the so-called Book of Thoth. In which God Thoth hid the wisdom of the world in an object of vice, the game of cards.
But tarot comes to us through its medieval French and Italian versions. The wisdom of the arcana and the paths of life turns this card game into a cathedral that was guarded and transmitted by the ancients like every hermetic tradition from ear to ear until it reached us in the era of indiscriminate dissemination of information and disinformation.
In Brazil, there are theories that the first deck arrived hidden when the Jesuits arrived. Certainly, the magical traditions of the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean have found fertile ground over the centuries in syncretism with indigenous and African traditions in Brazil.” ✱
