This is your debut North American exhibition — what did you feel when you learned you’d be bringing your work to the United States?
When I observe the institutional spaces where I show my works, I generally restrain my thrill, as I am very aware of the artistic path I have tread, so these institutional events end up being more bureaucratic than a big celebration. My daily practice is religious. Everything I do is a form of worship. There is no hierarchy in what I present. Whether it is at MoMA, on the street, or in a room in my house, the delivery is sacred.
Why is it important to you to empower Black communities and honor important Black cultural figures through your work?
Being known as a painter is a very treasured thing for someone who comes from the favela. This is true for people from the favela who do not see this as a value, as well as for the elites who hold this trade in very high regard. I believe that this is the importance of my occupation in this game.
I believe that painting is, today, the most relevant medium. Sometimes I consider whether filmmaking could be this, but I always come back to painting, because aside from being very traditional, it is also very religious. Moreover, by its very nature, filmmaking is reproducible, which makes it more popular, while painting is a single, exclusive, and exclusionary object. If it is here, then it can’t be there. In the frenzy of the phenomenon of social networks, the value of painting has been conserved. It continues silent in an increasingly noisy world. People listen to what the painting is saying. It is inside a cellar of contemplation, a taught and learned behavior, that painting continues being affirmed as a codified, ethereal space of slow absorption for those with the privilege of aesthetic appreciation or the time of eternal leisure.
How did hip-hop culture and rap culture shape you, personally?
I believe that the greatest thing that rap could teach me is something that I already learned in my street skating days, which is to know how to walk on the street and to learn how to carry oneself.
Why did you decide to unite Pardo É Papel and New Power for the first time at The Shed? What strengths do these works possess when shown together, as opposed to separately?
Since the beginning of the Pardo é Papel (The Glorious Victory) traveling show, I was adding at least one painting from New Power. Since this subseries had not been released yet, that was a way of introducing it within The Glorious Victory, the prologue to New Power. In The Glorious Victory, I paint the empowering of the black community through the ostentation of material goods such as cars, yachts, jewelry, and money, while also pointing to some professions of upward mobility for more melanated people, as is the case of music and soccer in Brazil. The Glorious Victory is also the period of my own rise as a visual artist, a new and unpredictable profession for a black person — especially one from a favela. Together with this, my exhibitions became relevant for managing to attract the public, from the urban outskirts to museums and galleries. This phenomenon was a prophecy in The Glorious Victory, which pointed to the narratives of New Power, where it is possible to see this community inhabiting white spaces dedicated to aesthetic appreciation and the maximum experience of privilege, which is subjectivity and abstraction.
New Power, therefore, is contemporary art for this group. The brown rectangles in the images of this series are a direct reference to the large banners of brown paper which are of the works shown in The Glorious Victory. The white in the background is a nod to the white cube — the galleries and museums — while the black characters evince a sense of belonging to and a very tranquil relationship with this new universe. This is the scenario that I paint in New Power, but which was previously invoked in the first period of Pardo é Papel, in The Glorious Victory.
That is to say, when New Power and The Glorious Victory come together face to face, sharing the same room at The Shed, the power of this conceptual mirroring acquires physicality. This exhibition is self-referent and is constantly mirroring itself. By seeing and physically attending the show, one becomes fully and personally aware of how the series is contained in the other.