We shall enter through the sacristy. Through the space where works are made behind the altar, in secret and with partial decorum, in an almost sacred enclosure. A place of mystery, seclusion, labor, and witness. In revisiting the artistic and architectural production of the Brazilian Baroque in Minas Gerais, David Almeida (born in Brasília, Brazil, in 1989) is drawn to the relevance of a visual grammar detached from faith and the dynamics of labor intrinsic to its creation. Reinterpreting the rocaille, florals, and volutes of churches in Ouro Preto, Mariana, and Congonhas — cities from the aforementioned Brazilian state —, the artist questions how the manifestation of these visual elements in the Brazilian context can evoke a notion of the sacred through a conditioned, catechized gaze, one that is not inherently divine.

In the power of this sharp threshold, Almeida employs motifs and techniques from sacred polychromy — such as surface preparations with Armenian bole, shellac, rabbit skin glue, and egg tempera — as witnesses to a belief in painting as a form of priesthood, and in artistic practice as a devotional penance. The surfaces ignite with urgency: complexity, infinity, reflections, and vertigo are pillars of both the Baroque and contemporaneity. In this exhibition, the artist is attracted to the imperfect copying of European treatises in tacit disobedience, the gradual fall of classicism in the composition of new traditions, and the contestation of images imposed on us as taste and respect.

“Arriba do chão” — literally, “over the ground”, or “lift yourself from the ground” —, in imperative mood, was already a prophecy^². The earth rose and bent toward the sky. The large wooden panels covering the gallery’s ceiling are Almeida’s references to ceiling paintings in the naves, high altars, and sacristies of Baroque churches in the interior of Minas Gerais. The primary intent of such paintings, originally from 17th-century Italy, was to simulate the heavens: through feigned, scenographic architecture painted to suggest volumes beyond the flat boards, there was an attempt at a vertical expansion of space in a surge, as in typical scenes of ascension, where hagiographic representations rise to the heavens in apotheosis. There is a coefficient of mystery in these codes.

An image of belief is emulated, a projection. The treatise^³ by Italian Jesuit Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) aimed at the didactic dissemination of practical perspective methods, like a manual for craftsmen. These meticulous optical illusions constructed false domes and false heavens. (“And there wasn’t even a sky. Isn’t it a miracle? To see a constellation without a sky?”).^⁴ The book did not intend to be a theoretical compendium for academic study but rather a set of strategies applicable to practical contexts, treating painting as urgent. It established a bridge of exchange between the master and the disciple, akin to divine instruction, which the latter would obey in devotion. Pozzo, directly or indirectly, influenced the formation of numerous artists from the late 17th century, including the reception and reworking of European traditions in colonial Brazil. This inflection point interests Almeida: 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.

The paintings of Mestre Ataíde and João Nepomuceno, created in Minas Gerais between the 18th and 19th centuries, accessed catechizing and colonialist canons tied to particular realities of Europe. However, these transformed, in the context of a deceptive receptivity, into an imagined, mentally constructed world — one not seen but imagined. The hands guiding the brushes followed the sinuosities and rhythms of blue and red spirals and conches with a certain freedom that broke from norms^⁵, not necessarily painting what they had seen but how they imagined things to be. Or perhaps they were referencing a copy, already altered, of another, equally modified. The notion of purity from a colonial context is vile and unfounded.

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. Just as visual models and conceptual decorum came from Italian treatises, the sculptural legacy of the Tyrolean Alps, Iberian customs filtered through Portuguese tastes, and the unavoidable presence of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous systems, 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.

Almeida’s ceiling paintings do not feature human or divine figures like those seen in Baroque churches. Instead, they create desolate spaces that witness pilgrimages, miracles, and apparitions, spanning from the Brazilian cerrado to Gethsemane — settings somewhat reminiscent of his recent works that explore the nature of landscape painting, present in small wooden pieces on one of the walls of this exhibition. In these fragmented images that guide the viewer through the hall, the artist invokes the subtle solemnity of having to look upwards to see, as if called toward the heavens, beyond the turbulence of being overwhelmed by the image before fully absorbing it. In these paintings, there is a negotiation with visibility, rooted in an inherent inability to grasp the scene clearly: the figure’s gesture becomes more critical than the thick accumulation of layers. This paradoxical impulse is a return to the idea of painting a body in transition, in passing, in something almost seen. Hills, caves, and olive trees, typical in representations of penitent saints, coexist with leaping fish, flaming shells, and elements of a central, empty crest.

In the center of the gallery, Almeida gathers and intervenes on objects that time has redefined. The materials reclaim their original agency, causing the utensils, ornaments, and ex-votos to revert to living wood, returning to their rustic, coppery, and fibrous aspects, shedding in scales the paint and gilding that once masked them. The artist’s interventions dwell in the gap between sacramental usurpation and the innocence of reinserting them into a sensitive space as objects of labor — whether spiritual, physical, or of another kind. The green fabric covering the bases and supporting the sculptures references the covers of art encyclopedias that compile European collections and sought to artificially and illusively systematize hermetic and uniform artistic styles. The totems are arranged in the nave, responding to a Baroque mise-en-scène — one that the Jesuits were concerned might incorporate elements of pagan theater into their liturgical events — thus profaning the space with witnesses of both miracles and labor.

In the hat-making tool, which resembles a massive split bell traversed by a metal screw rod, Almeida tiles the two internal surfaces that continuously face each other: a serene night sky, with crosses representing stars, confronting a turbulent firmament in flight, where the celestial bodies exist only in faith, and the clouds are made of much earth. The brick cast, pressed countless times by the potter, becomes a reliquary, a traveling oratory kept open by a skull sculpture that reminds us of the dust of the future and the dust of the present.^⁶

On the final wall of the gallery, as if we were looking from the nave of the altar towards the main door — the perspective of the laborer of faith —, there is a painted wooden headboard replicating, on a smaller scale, a windbreak: a wooden apparatus that prevented strong winds from entering the church and extinguishing its candles, or from allowing the storm to seep in. Carved along the edges and crowning, its center is painted by Almeida with the vestige of a landscape, an image that lingers in the mind even at rest, cradling the haze of formless sleep. Imagining lying down and gazing at the painting on the headboard is akin to the act of observing a ceiling painting: a condition that defies frontal perception.

In many paintings that depict miraculous healings, the sick subjects are shown lying in bed, with a saintly figure standing at their feet. It is curious to think that, in many of these intimate, cloistered scenes, the images, in fact, levitate and inhabit a sky without a floor. By removing the scene from the foreground, Almeida continues to produce his arid and warm landscapes on carved wood, investigating the possibility that miracles may still be present and that the force of the landscape itself might surge as an element of rapture and transcendence.

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1. Mateus Nunes (born in, Belém, Brazil, in 1997) is a curator and researcher. He holds a PhD in art history from the University of Lisbon, with postdoctoral fellowships at the University of São Paulo, the Getty Foundation, and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. He has devoted all of his academic research to the Brazilian Baroque, coordinating courses on the subject at MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo). He writes about contemporary art for magazines such as Artforum, ArtReview, Flash Art, frieze, Terremoto, and seLecT.
2. “Arriba do chão” is the title of both the artist’s solo exhibition at Galeria Millan in 2022 and Pollyana Quintella’s curatorial text for the occasion.
3. The treatise Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum was published in Rome in two volumes: the first in 1693 and the second in 1700. It was extensively translated, re-printed, and distributed by Jesuit missions throughout the world.
4. Milton Hatoum, Dois irmãos. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2006, p. 29, free translation.
5. I emphasize that, although it happened incidentally, the incorporation of expressions from Afro-diasporic and indigenous visual systems in the colonial context was not welcome.
6. The skull, an iconographic reference to the Latin motto memento mori, which reminds us of human mortality, recalls the sermon given by the Jesuit priest Antônio Vieira (1608-1697) on Ash Wednesday in 1672 (Antônio Vieira, Sermões, vol. 1 (org. Alcir Pécora). São Paulo: Hedra, 2019, pp. 53-70).