Mythological, archetypical, identity-based, mystical, and historical pieces belonging to a variety of characters and peoples come together on the metaphysical plain—and in the works of Thiago Martins de Melo—in a jigsaw of narratives arranged in varying degrees and reliefs in symbolic layers of pictorial masses. Thiago draws on these diverse techniques to articulate content, creating unconscious plans of analysis as if seeking to give life to an increasingly carnal style of painting, situated on the border between two and three dimensions.

In his work, Martins de Melo reinforces what curator and critic Gunnar Kvaran had identified as his ability to “reinvent the narrative structure in the world of painting,”  which, in my opinion, also seems to resignify the content, use and conceptual scope of traditional terms such as “anthropophagy” and “cannibalism.”

Since the early series “The Cycle of the Dog” and “Tricephal in Catharsis,” Thiago has been expressing his cannibalistic appetite  for institutions and values, carrying out transgressions through a process of devouring that chews them up and recreates them as critique—political, social and psychological—before digesting or excreting them.

In self-portraiture, Thiago transferred literal experiences onto his body, putting himself in the place of others, recreating spiritual and archetypal metaphors, and traveling through paths and landscapes as sublime as they were inhospitable. He explains, “The fact that I portray myself alongside indigenous people or mestizos makes me feel that I’m painting my friends and myself at the same time. The State, for all of us, is not consistent with our values.” 

From his earliest works, desire, carnal libido, and the encounter with female power seem to replace the meaning of the Passion of the Christ. The “heresy” that this may represent socially fuels Thiago’s intention to question—and to crush in order to dump out as excrement—authoritarian political power, monotheistic belief, and the machismo of an inquisitorial and castratory “father” whose laws threaten the carnal fusion between anima and animus.

Sex and amorous ecstasy lead to the sacred conjunction, to transformative and transcendental rites. Initially, these sentiments took shape in the struggle against rigid family structures, legacies, moral traditions regarded as civilized, Eurocentric religions, foundations of the state and codes of standard behavior. Gradually, this clash spread to other readings of the world.

Thiago Martins de Melo has always had an interest in hermetic signs, cosmogonies (especially of the Orishas) and the diversity of manifestations of what we call spirituality. As a friend and ex-wife of the artist, I was able to observe that the making of several pieces was sometimes influenced by reflections generated through contact with spiritual guides and protectors, by the Tarot of Marseilles and by elements that appeared in dreams. At times, I can trace a psychological relationship between the events, turns and crises that marked Thiago’s life and the production of his works. I can see, for example, the influence of tarot on the journey of Thiago’s characters and in the construction of narratives which are adapted and represented according to his personal metaphors. In some works, such as xviii The Moon, xv The Devil and vii The Chariot, [pp.207, 208, 209], the correspondence with the major arcana of tarot is direct and immediate. But most of the time what attracts my attention is the fact that this interrelationship takes place indirectly, adorned with baroque  and anti-hegemonic elements from the artist’s imaginary, as may be seen quite literally in the work The Tower, or The Hour of the Rooster Prevents an Eye for an Eye [p. 133].

The cycles of death, life and rebirth present in these works are related to descriptions of archetypal journeys contained in tarot. For example, I see correspondence between characters such as Iris Fucked [p. 235] and “Strength—Arcanum xi.” This interrelation also seems to be present in complex narratives, as in the case of Mangrove Psychopomps—for Tereza Légua and Tunga [p. 92], which contains arcana such as “The High Priestess—ii”, “The Fool—0 or xxii”, “The Moon—xviii”, “Death” and “The Magician—I.”

In the work VII The Chariot, we see a reinterpretation of the arcanum, in which the artist himself is represented. He acts on the basis of discerning what he wants and seeks to direct opposing forces—of instinctive emotions and feelings—and his inner struggles to guide his way toward the expression of his will. Effort to have power over and maintain the balance between dualities; effort to control his instincts. In it, we see a kind of car or carriage which, despite having an engine, is drawn by two boars running in opposite directions. In shamanism, the boar uses a frightening mask to seek a path to the truth with vigor and courage; it is thus endowed with expressiveness, intelligence, and an ability to sense danger and to protect. The challenge is to control these wild boars as they try to charge in opposite directions. A rooster announces the awakening of instincts and desires; the strength of the horse accentuates the power of the car. It takes motivation, willpower and self-mastery to guide this car of instinctual desires. At the same time, the boars must be directed to serve this man’s choices so he can have full freedom without being dominated or having his trajectory paralyzed by them.

Another reincarnation of a tarot arcanus can be found in the work XV The Devil. The work features a gloomy environment where the excesses of material ambition are represented, in particular, for the body, sex, and the domination of pleasures. Bats and vultures announce the danger of death, the risk of ruin, the need to be born again into the light in order to face danger without fear of seeing it. The chained couple represents people who can be both prisoners of and collaborators with the devil’s energy.

The Tower, Arcanum xvi of the Tarot of Marseilles, known as “The Tower”, or “The House of God,” is also a reference for the work The Tower, or The Hour of the Rooster Prevents an Eye for an Eye. The light of the painting does not come from the sky but from the fire of the burning chapel, which destroys the chapel and the figure of the authoritarian, coronelist politician who lived there. The fault is punished in the name of the principles of cause and effect represented in “Justice,” Arcanum viii. A rooster announces the moment of the fall and the ruin of the structures while perched on the shoulders (and the history) of a black woman and the slave Anastácia, like a totem of memory and ancestrality of struggle. This moment of awakening and renovation demonstrates the archetypal effect of two arcana on this journey of struggle: “Judgment” (Arcanum xx) and “Tower” (Arcanum xvi). Atop this totem are spiritual entities and a black man with a revolutionary countenance. On one side, caboclo and indigenous spiritual entities celebrate victory in a communion of ideals. The wounded eyes of the black man, the Indian, and the white man are connected at the hour of the Last Judgment. Although hoped for and celebrated by spiritual guides, Justice is carried out by men, by fire and sword; it does not come from heaven. What is broken down and annihilated along with the “Tower” is only that which had no solid basis, what was not in accordance with the universal law, that which must be destroyed to generate redemption. Everything will be recreated from new foundations under the “House of God.” The totem of people, near the heavens, is maintained. By devouring structures, Thiago makes us witness of his passions and narratives of justice against atrocities, forms of slavery, unbridled ambition and domination over nature, oppression and death committed in the name of what strike him as cruel and rancid foundations. Thiago’s anthropophagy or cannibalism also seem to seek a quintessence of God through the devouring of the body and the moral entity of the monotheistic deity. He becomes the master of his own ethic, one which redeems a diversity of moral and psychological expressions.

Thiago Martins de Melo’s hunger stretched beyond the institutions and values that castrated his own world. He saw the universe from the complex window of his atelier in São Luís, located in the Legal Amazon of the state of Maranhão. From there he began to observe issues that seem to be local, but are in fact reflections of the homogenizing steamroller of globalization. Global and local dimensions interconnect in struggles against this steamroller, reinforcing local meanings and characteristics.

The existing prejudice against different forms of knowledge, beliefs and cosmogonies leads Thiago to ask, in one of the first works of the series “Nagô-Cartesian Theater”: Where does the soul reside in the body? Is it situated in the pineal gland, as Cartesian rationalism argues? Or could it be located at the nape of the neck, as Nagô cosmogony understands it? How can we comprehend the psyche and the soul? What would the physical geography of the souls of different peoples look like? And how does this translate into worldviews?

These questions lead Thiago to seek archetypal connections behind everything. Through hybrid signs and syncretic expressions, he combines broader systems of African, Amerindian, Caribbean, Hindu, Anglo-American, and Latin cosmogonies, to mention just a few. However, this leads him to confront another problem: how to represent, for example, the contemporary image of the Indian, the quilombola, the caboclo, the “non-white” or the “poor white”, given the idealized way in which they have been portrayed since the 17th century?

On this point, Thiago Martins de Melo intuitively accesses issues that challenge anthropology and social thought in Brazil and across the world. The anguish of the identity-based struggles of peoples calling for recognition, the many meanings of territory, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the slippages that sometimes encourage or deny cultural agglutination, syncretism and miscegenation. However, it is through art, desire and feeling that Thiago’s personal truths emerge. Far beyond any theory or politicization, he is guided by affection and respect for the construction of the image.

Forms of expression coalesce with imagistic and energetic “altars”, ebós, or “offerings” made by Thiago Martins de Melo. For instance, Thiago invokes his Orishas, guides and personal entities just as many diverse traditional peoples, indigenous groups and quilombolas do in defense of their original territories and in support of their political-libertarian struggle. His works often openly pay tribute or “obligations” to the spiritual entities that nourish artists’ creativity and strengthen them in their trials, such as Ogum (Orisha), dona Tereza Légua Boji Buá and senhor Joaquim da Cachoeira (from the mine), among so many others.

Painting seems to me to promote a ritual of alterity between (mostly white) spectators, the painter and his/her characters. In this ritual, both the artist, his/her works and spectators can act as channelers of entities or characters, embodying feelings, tributes and the recognition of figures whose expression in society is usually marked by prejudices, condemnation, intolerance and violence.

In this way, the present-day portrayal of sages such as pretos-velhos, prevents the silencing of the memory of slavery and makes us reflect on the continuity of enslavement under new and varied forms. Similarly, pombas-giras featured in the artist’s works dance with his audience, provoking reflection about the contemporary existence of women who are still execrated, oppressed, judged and raped for claiming freedom for their bodies, their love, their work, their future and their thought. Wielding the power of the forest, the Caboclo Tupinambá is recognized as both Amazonian caboclo and indigenous, without one identity excluding the other or separating his existence from nature. The Exu, feared as a demon, condemned to disdain by Western or European religions, makes us inquire about the public executions and life sentences carried out in the name of racism, or the fear of difference. Exu also reminds us of our renounced instincts, our need for pleasure, and the underbelly of pain and the unconscious underworld. By being celebrated or revered in ritual by “civilized whites,” Exu both frees us and itself from “sins” committed through dancing, irreverence, and the pleasures of drinking, smoking, sex, and material domination.

The painting Martyrdom [p. 138-41], exhibited at the 31st Bienal of São Paulo, is an example of this logic. In it, the sacred caboclos of umbanda and tambor de mina who support the struggles of anonymous heroes, like the caboclos Sete Flechas and Ubirajara, are portrayed as they are known in their altars, with the headdress of the Apache American Indian. Thiago explains: “Yes, I’m going to put the North American Indian headdress on Ubirajara and Sete Flechas. In order to represent them as friendly caboclos, I need to use the iconography of colonialist origin that marks their representation, because it is this iconography that I am familiar with. This is what is known as a sign of power by Umbanda and Tambor de Mina, and it’s what gives me the desire to paint. Moreover, they (caboclos) want to be honored and represented in the way that they are. This is what leads to affection.” 

The characters portrayed by the artist—who often have faces identified as “Maranhenses” or “Amazonian,” unrecognizable to the rest of Brazil and the world—are illustrative; they represent universal people involved in situations of global resistance. The combatants are individuals and groups who stake a claim to the recognition of identity rights and the difference inherent in their ways of life based on their interrogative experience, the need to defend their territories, and the fight against discrimination and legal and political exclusion. They lay claim to the meaning of cultural difference, therefore representing a form of postcolonial thought. Politically, they denounce abuses of power by governmental agencies; economically, they question the contradictions of the global model of development and the forms of integration into national and international circuits of capital.

In order to illustrate the connections between the pictorial narrative constructed by the artist and the complex and inspiring fragments present in his daily life, I would like to tell a true story that resonates with the present day.

It was the 1960s, during the construction of Port of Itaqui  in the famous Bay of São Marcos, the second deepest in the world, in São Luís, state of Maranhão. For some, it was a bay with a “natural economic vocation,” a patrimony of the export business. For those who lived, worked and built their dreams there, it was the abode of the encantados, enchanted beings  like Dom Sebastiao, and its land and waters were watched over by Princess Ina, his daughter. It was the eternal dwelling of Gonçalves Dias, a poet who was shipwrecked there in 1864, clutching the epic poem Os timbiras in his arms. It was land destined to be the home and livelihood of hundreds of traditional families who lived off the land, the seas, the mangrove, and relations of mutual cooperation. Because of the difference they assert, these populations are called backwards, or blamed for hindering the “development of the nation.”

The construction of the first pier of the Port of Itaqui in the 70’s, seemed to be cursed by the encantados. The sea would regurgitate every construction supported by the government. The companies feared the increasing number of accidents involving workers and shipwrecks, as did the workers, and were frightened by the night apparitions of Dom Sebastião. They needed to contain this disapproval and appease Princess Ina. They needed to convince the communities that the project would bring about “development,” and that the economic pie  would grow and one day be shared if local people sacrificed their lands and lives to the port. In order to ritualize the sacrifice, the state government summoned the communities and terreiros (candomblé houses of worship) for a great ritual in honor of Ina, to ask for her blessing of the port. Drums were played. Fishermen, peasant families, marisqueiras , quilombolas  and crab-pickers danced with government representatives, asking for Ina to bless the port and the “development” it symbolized. These hopes would be dashed. Coincidence or not, the project was finished... and today the increasingly hungry port devours the territories and environment of the communities who endure there because they no longer believe in so-called “development.”

Between 2014 and early 2017, the installation of a new port was attempted in the same Bay of São Marcos, without license or legal authorization, bulldozing the homes of the residents of the village of Cajueiro in São Luís, capital of the state of Maranhão. In the space of a few hours, 21 homes were knocked down during the Christmas season. Dozens of rural communities on the Ilha do Maranhão  rose up, having experienced firsthand the same aggression and dishonor; they joined the struggle for Cajueiro and the defense of its territories. Their repertoire included playing drums in front of the palace of the state government. At this moment, in the middle of a Brazilian state capital, peasants, fishermen, marisqueiras, indigenous people and quilombolas revive and reformulate an indigenous chant used against the colonizers in defense of the Cajueiro community. With this, the politicians, grileiros (land-grabbers) and businessmen shudder at the cry: “Tread lightly, tread lightly, if you can’t handle ant bites don’t provoke Cajueiro!”  The confrontation evokes the sacred: the land is ours! It belongs to those who live and work here! Don’t mess with us, the Terreiro do Egito is here. Here lives Princess Ina, and she is furious at having been deceived. Diverse traditions brought together by the pain of being sacrificed for “developmentalist projects,” joining hands in a struggle that they compare to “David against Goliath”.

Terreiro do Egito and its enchanted beings, King Dom Sebastião and Princess Ina, became actors in the political confrontation related to this socio-environmental conflict. One of the oldest terreiros in Brazil, Terreiro do Egito was founded in 1864 and extinguished on December 14, 1980, is well known to practitioners of religions of African origin, symbolizing the centuries-long resistance of a people. According to Father Euclides, a recently deceased Candomblé priest who had served through 2015 at the head of the Fanti Ashanti temple,  a house of worship of great notoriety beyond the Ilha do Maranhão: the Terreiro do Egito and its surrounding community in Cajueiro served as a new home and “even as a quilombo. Some black folks who had escaped from Cururupu, Guimarães, passed by on ships [...] many of them jumped into the sea because of oppression, because they didn’t want to subject themselves to all of that.”

Thus, Terreiro do Egito was not only the house of the encantados, but also a site for the “invention of freedom.” It was in this sense that the story of Terreiro do Egito and its leader,  dona Maria Pia, were intertwined: “Maria came from Africa as a child slave in her mother’s little arms [...] She began to learn about life when she arrived, at seven years old. She began to spin nets on the loom with her mother, to do what the white master said. Until she invented freedom.”

Thiago also seeks to “weave” signs and memories and to “invent freedom” within his particular artistic space. All seems to be led by fire and a transformative drive, which destroys in order to recreate. This rupture is commanded by the tarot arcanum of “Death,” by the sword of Ogun, by the hammer of Nietzsche, by the fire set by the black man, by the manifest feminine power of the pomba-gira, and by the arrow of the indigenous person. Faith that the destruction of the “Tower” is redirecting a “Chariot” of impetuous forces, such as that of destiny, the lord of the “Wheel of Fortune,”  remaking the infinite rebirth of the “World.”  Life and death are represented by the fertility of the mangrove swamp. The holy madness of passions, the hell of pleasures guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog; the archetypal perfection of the alchemical figure of the Rebis (male and female fused to resignify the genders); the questioning of Cartesianism, Hindu, indigenous and Yorubá mythologies; the broken ceilings of rigid structures such as churches and houses; the chains that drag, reclaiming the memory of anonymous heroes and slaves; The spider Anansi recounting, in his own way, the stories of black folks; the cross that sodomizes and rapes; the birth of the redemptive mestizo...

From the paintings I hear drums in the unconscious, like a breeze from the Final Judgment of “Judgment”. In some battles, the characters borrow syncretic signs from others as weapons. In others, the characters simply do not accept miscegenation, hybridity or camouflage. They only admit signs that represent their self-esteem, making it clear: “A caboclo is not a seraphim.”

The meaning of the artist’s narratives is revealed by a “visual and pulsating unconscious.” The interweaving between the imagetic representations in his works and their titles provides valuable clues for analysis. However, in most cases it is not possible to acquire a complete, immediate or hasty understanding of these pieces. Their complex and significant elements seem to come later, operating on the plane of memory, the unconscious, the imaginary, of insights, revelations, forgetting or prejudices that come from a repressed memory of stories that belong to us, to humanity.

As predicted by the principles of magic, the events contained in the narratives and their signs echo in various dimensions, times and spaces, imparting powerful effects and manifesting themselves through synchronicities and propagations that are not always sequenced. The pictorial ebó  or ritual artistic process of Thiago Martins de Melo has the magical force of alchemy, of healing and the drums of the mine and Umbanda, of chants that give strength to forced and monotonous labor. The paintings also depict the defiance and day-to-day resistance of the people through a variety of methods, including witchcraft against the colonial settler, cursing of the masters and the poisoning of bush captains. These methods were historically employed as resistance by enslaved blacks, indigenous people, and even peasants of the contemporary Amazon, against masters and coronéis.

As described and experienced by Jung  in The Red Book, in coming into contact with the sign, Thiago seems to connect with the world, perhaps in an artistic-social experience visionary of our times.

I wonder, for example: in painting, months in advance, the barricaded occupations under the awning of Brazil’s National Congress and the invasion of the villages by “black mud,” and in portraying, years earlier, the disaster of the “wounds of dirty iron” [pp. 108-09] caused by mining, might the artist be connected to a kind of Neuromancer ? Might he enter, via signs, into an almost physical cyberspace, a kind of programmed matrix in which the causes and effects of events can be seen? Or might he have access to the images of Plato’s world of ideas, in which existing events would ideally be replicated, with distortions of reality, in our physical universe? Might he anticipate, ahead of our times, the battles that await us? Still, I question: is there sense in Thiago’s (alchemist) belief that his pictorial ebó would bring down (to the physical world) what is already above (in the spiritual world) and vice versa?

In my view, Thiago is above all conscious of the power of signs. In using signs as his “artistic witchcraft,” he joins his caboclos, Orishas and guides in the same impulse of justice: “If you give me the right leaves and I sing as I have learned, I will deliver the whole earth from all that is evil.”

________________________

References

BENJAMIN, Walter. “Sobre o conceito de história”. In: Magia e técnica, arte e política: ensaios sobre literatura e história da cultura. Trans. by Sérgio Paulo Rouanet. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994.

BHABHA, Homi K. O local da cultura. Trans. by Myriam Ávila, Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis and Gláucia Renate Gonçalves. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2005.

BRAGA, Pedro. O touro encantado da Ilha dos Lençóis (o sebastianismo no Maranhão). Petrópolis: Vozes, 2001.

CAVALCANTI, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro. Carnaval carioca: dos bastidores ao desfile. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Edufrj, 2006.

FERRETTI, Mundicarmo Maria Rocha. Maranhão encantado: encantaria maranhense e outras histórias. São Luís: Uema, 2000.

FERRETTI, Sérgio F. “Encantaria Maranhense de Dom Sebastião”. Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais | Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, v. 1, n. 1, 2013, pp. 262-85.

GEDMMA. Relatório socioantropológico. resex de Tauá-Mirim: Cajueiro e outras comunidades tradicionais na luta por justiça e direitos territoriais, Zona Rural ii, São Luís (MA) – Brasil. São Luís: ufma, 2014.

JUNG, Carl Gustav. O livro vermelho – Liber Novus. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2010.

MALIGHETTI, Roberto. “Sou um mineiro, tenho tenda mineira e vivo cuidando da religião: fusões de tradições nas palavras de um mineiro maranhense e dos seus guias”. Revista Pós Ciências Sociais, v. 11, n. 21, jan-jun., 2014, pp. 35-58.

NUNES, Benedito. Oswald Canibal. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979.