David Almeida (1989, Brasília, Brazil) inaugurates his solo exhibition Vigília on Saturday, October 5, at Millan. The artist will showcase a collection of new works, in which he explores new formats and mediums. These include paintings on canvas, wood, and objects, along with a large panel covering the entire ceiling of the exhibition space.
Vigília brings together the most recent developments in Almeida’s research, starting from a trip to the historic towns of Ouro Preto, Congonhas, and Mariana in Minas Gerais. In these works, the artist examines the Brazilian pictorial tradition and how European models and visual languages were adapted to local conditions. As Mateus Nunes writes in the exhibition essay, what drives Almeida is “the fascination with Brazil’s always-hybrid pictorial tradition, uncategorizable due to its contamination, vulnerable because of its impurity, and untamable because of its fervor.”
During this process, Almeida also devoted himself to absorbing techniques and materials used in 18th-century production, such as polychromy, egg tempera, gilders clay, and shellac. His intention, however, goes beyond merely reproducing Baroque visuality. Almeida isolates and reworks certain elements common in church and chapel paintings, devotional works, and ex-votos, so that rocaille, floral motifs, volutes, and other architectural forms emerge as outlines in his paintings.
For Almeida, artistic creation is seen as diligent work, an act of penance. Thus, more than referencing the grand paintings found in church naves and chapels, his works refer to sacristy paintings — secluded spaces restricted to the “workers” of the churches. “Unlike the paintings in worship halls, sacristies were adorned with depictions of penitent saints,” explains the artist. “These figures seem to inhabit desolate landscapes whose weight and gloom threaten to crush the viewer.
This sensation is conveyed in the large ceiling panel composed of five paintings on wood, suspended at a height similar to that of sacristies' ceilings. Here, the landscape is revealed among forms seen in Baroque ornaments, hinted at with quicker and more gestural strokes.
Beneath this large panel are three-dimensional works that incorporate and rework a series of objects collected by the artist during his travels, many of which date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. These include brick moulds, hats and shoes, fragments of confessionals, oratories, and altars, as well as other pieces without a specific function, which have now become supports for new sculptural and pictorial arrangements.
The exhibition layout recalls the flow through the naves of churches, starting at the entrance and leading to an “altar”, represented here by a painting done on the headboard of an old bed — reinforcing the dreamlike quality of his works. Lastly, the artist presents a set of small paintings that evoke the tradition of ex-votos. These are landscapes where gesture is a dominant trait, emulating the speed with which devotional paintings needed to be made.
“Almeida’s genealogical investigation seems not only to explore the images that shaped Brazilian artistic traditions but also to address the solidity of a multifaceted, evolving Brazilian identity”, Nunes states. "Almeida transposes these investigative impulses concerning imagery onto himself, his own landscape of pilgrimage: an attempt to understand a self-forged and permeated by the urban flows of São Paulo, where he lives; the Brasília cerrado, where he was born; the fictional northeastern sertão, the land of his family; and the visual universe of Minas Gerais, where he was profoundly moved.
