Banzo, Love and the Home Kitchen, Afro Brasil Museum

Fifty paintings, drawings and sculptures form the set of pieces from the exhibition “Banzo, Love and the Home Kitchen” , by the artist Sidney Amaral, at the Afro Brasil Museum, Institution of the Secretary of Culture of the State of São Paulo.

The plastic artist won the Funarte Prize for Black Art, The show is an expressive part of this exhibition is made up of self-portraits. I use my body as a representation of an idea of ​​identity, of memory; fragments of my body rethought in the object of the houses.

After participating in important exhibitions, Sidney Amaral held his first solo exhibition at the Museu Afro Brasil. “The museum has a catalytic role for the emergence of new black artists”. The exhibition will also feature works spanning 15 years of Sidney Amaral’s artistic career. They are sculptures in marble and bronze and resin, as well as drawings and paintings that use acrylic and watercolor techniques.

Sidney Amaral always works in two stages: that of the reality of objects and that of including himself as a character who acts of free will in the composition of the black background. “Sidney is the tightrope walker in action, discussing the daily life of a black man in a society, always willing to forget the values ​​intended for everyone, without exception”.

The Encontro com Artista project promotes a dialogue between the visitors and the guest, with the objective of expanding the possibilities of aesthetic appreciation of the participant, based on contact with the work and with the artist’s history. Sidney Amaral’s great exhibition at the Afro Brasil Museum brings surprising appeals, due to the many paths he proposed.

Biography
Sidney Carlos do Amaral (São Paulo, São Paulo, 1973 – Idem, 2017). Visual artist and teacher. Amaral’s extensive production explores, in different languages, the poetic and formal versatility of everyday objects. In his paintings, he problematizes identity issues, expanding the Brazilian artistic debate about the representation of contemporary black man.

In the 1990s, he studied at the São Paulo High School of Arts and Crafts (Laosp) , at the Panamerican School of Arts, at the ECOS Escola de Fotografia and graduated in Art Education at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation (Faap), in 1998. In the next year, he is a student of the artist Ana Maria Tavares (1958) in the course of orientation and development of artistic projects at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (Mube). Throughout his career, he reconciles artistic production with the work of an art teacher in the public school system. In 2001, he held his first solo exhibition at Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP).

At first, he is interested in the elaboration of prosaic objects, out of context and forged in noble materials, such as marble, bronze and porcelain. The Balloons in Suspension series (2009) explores semantic and visual paradoxes between the lightness of the shape and the weight of the bronze, the delicacy of polishing the balloons and the rusticity of the chainsaw chain that holds them. It chooses impalpable and ephemeral themes, such as Os Slippers da Namorada (2nd version, 2014), a sculpture in which polished bronze sublimates and fixes an everyday episode. The encounter of material refinement with thematic banality causes tension between both, since theme and forms are far from the synthesis and idealization associated with noble materials.

The photographic self-portrait is used as a support for the creation of paintings in which the artist places himself among objects that speak of affective relationships. These relationships are amplified by the narrative drama and an enigmatic and disturbing atmosphere, familiar to metaphysical painting. Many of his characters are in situations of impasse. In Imolação (2009/2014), the self-portrait describes a “self-immolation”, which for Amaral can be interpreted as liberation: “when seeing in the middle of the screen a man with a gun pointed at his head, the first thing that is thought is that the person represented in the painting wants to kill himself. But it’s not true. Precisely for this reason I call it Immolation. Immolation is what you do for something greater […] You are killing yourself because you don’t want to be a slave, you don’t want to lose your identity, your freedom ”

In an artistic residency at the Tamarind Institute (USA), in 2013, she worked on issues of racial identity through lithography. The use of this technique, as well as watercolor, brings his visual chronicle closer to the records on the enslaved, made by traveling artists in Brazil. Amaral updates this iconography, giving voice to the represented subject. Heavy, introspective watercolors, with abundant dark areas, contrast with the exteriority of the tasks recorded by travelers. In O Estrangeiro (2011), the black artist himself is represented in a difficult path towards the world of the arts. Already in the watercolor Gargalheira, Who Will Speak for Us?(2014), the instrument of torture from the past merges with the mediatized social oppression of the present. It unites feelings of invisibility and overexposure of the black person, who, massively challenged by microphones, assumes a haughty silence and rejects the system.

As critic Tadeu Chiarelli (1956) observes, the recurrence of self-portrait in the work of Sidney Amaral, as well as that of other black artists in the late 19th century, can be understood as a means of social, professional and identity affirmation. In Amaral’s production, collective dilemmas are brought to the first person as an expressive strategy and, thus, gain concreteness.

Opposing the Liberation of Slaves (1888) by Pedro Américo (1843-1905) , a work that allegorizes the abolition according to imperial power, in the polyptico Uncomfortable (2014), Amaral offers us the vision of a black man who reviews abolition as resistance, struggle and uncertainty. At first, this work evokes the allegories of Glauco Rodrigues (1929-2004)1960s / 70s, especially regarding the dialogue between drawing and photography. However, Amaral’s austere narrative moves away from the festive delight of the artist from Rio Grande do Sul.

In the center, dances and emblematic characters such as the wet nurse Mônica, taken from the photography of João Ferreira Villela (1860), and a girl who wears shoes, as a symbol of the conquest of citizenship. In the background, the artist portrays himself as an observer of an apotheosis of black culture, which recalls the following historical personalities, from left to right: Francisco José do Nascimento (1839-1914), known as Dragão do Mar or Chico da Matilde, leader of rafts in abolitionist struggles; journalists José do Patrocínio (1853-1905) and Luiz Gama (1830-1882); and João Cândido Felisberto (1880-1969), the “Black Admiral”, member of the Revolta da Chibata. I

Whether in the construction of paradoxical objects, provocative of an unusual poetry, or in the continuous investigations about his own identity and urban relations, Amaral tries not to depart from the most striking characteristic of each object. For this, the drawing marked by the photographic reference is its instrument of appropriation of images and forms.

The exhibition
Banzo, Love and House Kitchen, a major exhibition of Sidney Amaral at the Afro Brazil Museum brings amazing “appeals” in the best sense of that word, due to the many paths proposed by him. (…) Just as there is life, there is a present and a past time. And both became resolute so that life can go on.

Highlights
Sidney Amaral is one of the first artists to receive the honor conferred by Funarte Award for Black Art.

Corner for Ogum
Away from here and away from me
The girlfriend’s slippers: II version
The prince
Political animal II
Annunciation
Absence
Nuisance (5 screens)
Gargalheira or who will speak for us?
Finally I found you or the elective affinities
Well want me, bad want me
The sheep and me

Afro Brasil Museum
Museu Afro Brasil is a public institution, held by São Paulo State Secretariat for Culture and managed by Associação Museu Afro Brasil – Organização Social de Cultura (Museu Afro-Brasil Association – Social Organization for Culture)

It aims to be a contemporary museum where the black people can be recognized.

Over than 6,000 works highlight the importance of African people in the formation of Brazilian culture, heritage and identity as known nowadays. Also, it offers a celebration of the art and accomplishments of the Africans and Afro-Brazilians.

The Collection is considered the largest Afro – American in American with more than 6,000 masterpieces, sculptures, documents, engravings, ceramics, paintings, contemporary arts, jewelry, objects, reliefs, photographs and textiles.

Over than 70% of the collection is in the long term exhibition, portraying mainly Brazil, some countries from the African Continent, Cuba, Haiti and the United States.