For more than a decade, I have had the pleasure of following the extraordinary development and achievement of Thiago Martins de Melo. I have witnessed how he has been able to attain remarkable skills as a painter. He has mastered the diverse techniques of figurative painting, created new kinds of narrative structures, which combine on the canvas in macro and micro stories, divergent times and places and a mix of fiction and reality. His works show the richness of his knowledge and his culture – intellectual, spiritual and intuitive – and his own individual development and expansion.

In the beginning Martins de Melo’s paintings were related to his personal and family experience and existence, his close surroundings, but later he expanded his view to include the complexity of Brazilian society, even placing it, as well as his iconography, in a global context. His paintings embrace both the world and his inner life. They are always conceived and built up in layers of symbols and figures that enable him to include heteroclite elements of reality and beyond. Historical and social realities are always present, but there is also a spiritual and religious dimension, where energies and forces beyond our earthly world take action. There is also politics, a form of resistance that reveals the inner mechanisms of social injustice and discrimination. Martins de Melo is concerned about his compatriots, especially those who have been marginalized within Brazilian society. However, guided by the notion of “syncretism” he is able to extend his discourse to a more universal scene, where the signs and the symbols and different cosmological elements take on a more open and multi-semantic meaning, anchored in diverse realities from different times of humanity.

In his ambitious project as an artist and a storyteller, Martins de Melo has extended and reinvented the notion of painting by transforming his pictorial scenes into screen animations and sculptural objects or theatrical experiences. In his works, many narratives take place simultaneously, involving real people and events and spiritual forces, but always with a concern for coherence and clarity and a deep sense of aesthetics. His strong and powerful images are both appropriated and created and then placed in dialogue on the canvas. Most of the time they grow out of his imagination, inspired by folklore, ancient myths and real social events, cruel or sublime. Whatever the subject may be, one can sense the pleasure of painting in his works, the way he manipulates the materials and the brushes with sensuality and satisfaction.

This exhibition presents a moment in time in the work of an artist who finds himself in a continuous powerful trajectory. He has opened up and enlarged his subject matter and his pictorial approaches. We are confronted with works of great complexity in terms of themes and formal solutions. We find strong recurrent motives like the snake, a local and universal symbol that has crossed religions and historical times and has appeared in various works of older and contemporary masters. The first part of this exhibition presents a selection of works where the artist revisits this motif of the snake, which gives it its title: Ouroboros Sucuri. In the second part we have selected a constellation of new works, sculptures and paintings that show the ongoing experimentation of the artist with regards to formal novelties and ground-breaking narratives, which touch upon culture, spiritism, occultism, myths and politics within a postcolonial discourse. Together they make up a complex construction, where the spectator passes through different zones of reality-based fiction. It is that fusion of religious and spiritual signs and symbols and social and political references from the collective memory that load these works with their unusual energy and which places them within the great tradition of History painting.

Even though the works of Martins de Melo are inviting, seductive and appealing, they require a certain kind of interpretation from the spectator. Therefore, we thought it would be enlightening to allow the artist to speak for himself and tell us about his most important references and pictorial ingredients.

Welcome to the thoughts of Thiago Martins de Melo.