Cocoa, Oil on canvas, 1988. Photos: MAES Collection, Secult

By Nicolas Soares

There is a mistaken understanding that makes a painting attributed as primitivist an exercise in a disruptive attempt by erudite academicism. Incidentally, primitives are all those who already occupied the edge of the social chain of raciality – in which non-European peoples were organized – operated by the Eurocentric dedication to colonialism. The civilizing measure is supported by culture as a regulator of bodies and subjectivities: the “primitive tribes” surpass the sphere of “the other there, and me here” that sustained the anthropological and ethnographic disciplines, which designed, among many things, the normative anatomy, and thus also the scope of classical Western representation. Everything outside this field was attributed as savage and later catalogued as exotic allegories of non-civilization, of the non-human and the non-subject and, mainly, of non-culture.

Avant-garde modernisms dedicated themselves to looking at the newly known world with a certain anecdotal curiosity, cultivating the ambiguity of portraying their time and defending the fetish of dissimilarity, supported by the statute of “having”, which concerns every act of collecting. Collecting images from the wild beyond. However, Brazilian third-world modernism dedicated itself to the symbolic and imagetic construction of national identity, provoking the spirit of narratives, legends and figures that could awaken and corroborate an art detached from the academicism of traditional schools and movements, confronting a Brazilianness worshipped by the heirs of colonialism. In effect, the structure by which the elite of the arts itself was constituted was neglected.

Naïve art and other trends that moved against certain rules of art do not necessarily refer to what art would later call primitive: that which aligns itself with the wild, the untamed, the uncultured, the ignorant; because here “primitivists” are those sons and daughters of the colony whose knowledge, practices and ways of creating representation are far removed from the sociocultural norm in terms of image, conduct and importance. Because primitivism was [or perhaps still is] the intelligence by which colonial archetypes justified the domination and subordination of another – its way of life, its artifacts, its images and its territories. Similarly, mannerisms in pictorial and formal terms branched out from a style devoid of any origin, forcing the appropriation of this other by the core of culture and the art system.
Here we will do the exercise of reviewing the production of the artist from Espírito Santo, Nice Nascimento Avanza: the “cocoa artist”, the “great primitivist artist”, the “naïve artist” of the “exuberance of colors”, widely identified as such by the context of the arts and the press. Nice, a black woman, understood herself as a self-taught artist through friends who encouraged her.

This artist had an extensive production between the 1960s and 1990s, with her work being projected nationally and internationally, who lived off art and traveled around the world, who fell in love with cocoa, the countryside and cultivation; she lived off art.
Nice, considered one of the leading painters of Espírito Santo, was covered by the stigma of primitivism, less as a form and language, and more, it seems, as a reinforcement of the folklorization of the colonial structure. When we come across the repertoire presented by the artist, and in the context in which we are, we are able to articulate other issues that escape the exoticism and naivety attributed to her work as a painter. Expressions of the traditional popular culture of Espírito Santo emerge in a forceful manner, the iconographies of religions of African and Judeo-Christian origin – in favor of the beliefs of the subjects of the countryside, the backlands culture, farming and its care, fruits, flowers and animals…

If we bring some of these connections to light, we will realize that, behind a work that outlines the iconographies of religions of Afro and Christian origin, for example, there are discussions that delve into the syncretism of these manifestations as survival strategies of a people. In front of us, we have a vast production of contemporary artists who bring, from rituals, elaborations of the performative field in art; and from their objects, shifts from the standardizations of craftsmanship to the statutes of the art of a culture.

Likewise, the painting of the cocoa plantation presented in Nice provokes discussions about agribusiness, monoculture, deforestation, land expropriation, indigenous genocide, family farming, the decolonization of food and its elitist currency... Cocoa painted in oil on canvas, in strong colors, illuminated, lively, is no longer susceptible to a naive reading.

In 2025, the Museu de Arte do Espírito Santo – MAES is organizing the project NICE CONTEMPORÂNEA (expected to be exhibited in 2026), which consists of a discursive review of the work of artist Nice Nascimento Avanza – which is part of its collection – 25 years after her last exhibition at MAES, Nice Retrospectiva, in 2000, on the occasion of her death.
Nice Birth Advances (1938, Vitoria-ES – 1999, Sao Paulo-SP) ✱

*Nicolas Soares – Artist, curator and Director of the Espírito Santo Art Museum


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