Paulo Nazareth: VUADORA

Vuadora [flying kick] to the source, vuadora to the neck, vuadora to the back, to the forehead, to the chin and jawbone, vuadora to the top of the ear.… 

 

This exhibition stems from a question: how do we look back at the prolific practice of Paulo Nazareth – Arte Contemporânea/LTDA? VUADORA, 2022, Nazareth’s panoramic exhibition at Pivô, São Paulo, was, above all, an attempt to follow the rhythm and swing between bodies and words, and historical, geopolitical, and linguistic paths that have been the driving force behind the artist’s trajectory since the beginning of the 2000s, when he adopted his ancestral name, Nazareth:

 

I am Paulo. My name is Paulo Nazareth. Nazareth comes from my mother’s mother. So, Nazareth is a first name and not a surname. Nazareth Cassiano de Jesus. Born in Vale do Rio Doce, of Borum origin. To be Nazareth is to be my work. To become me. So, when I name myself Paulo Nazareth, this is also my work. I carry this ancestor. My grandmother becomes this sort of figurehead, right? This protection. This Egun that walks with me and protects me.

 

The exhibition time is spiral time that the artist has pursued throughout his wanderings in Latin America and Africa; a time that is measured and narrated via the body’s memories and performative ability, and that deliberately precludes linearity. Thus, any attempt at a chronological reading in VUADORA seemed pointless. In the exhibition, one could find Nazareth’s first and last works, but perhaps this is not what they are, perhaps they are these and other things. It could be that the first work contains the last, and vice versa. Like the artist himself, the works on view contain many others; they are made of collective matter. 
 

By combining emblematic works, many of them never before seen in Brazil, others that had never before left his studio in Palmital, Belo Horizonte, and a group of new works, we indeed confirmed the impossibility of resorting to linear time as a historical marker to explain Nazareth’s prolific oeuvre, or, to go further, any other contemporary artistic practice. Above all, Nazareth invites us to reconsider grammar, parameters, and cartographies. For him, to live in a state of displacement is also to refuse the ever-violent structures that circumscribe and define him as an individual, a citizen, and an artist. In his work, scenes of self-defense complexify these markers and are actualized at the same speed as the violence perpetrated by global racial capital. 
 

    Nazareth’s visual vocabulary is deliberately fragmented, or perhaps more accurately, “in the making.” The hashtags accompanying the exhibition’s expanded subtitles are a collective effort to contribute to his broad lexicon. The series of words and images created and manipulated by the artist present us with the possibility of a future that challenges the defining narrative of Black and Indigenous existence as an “excess that always already justifies (makes just) racial violence.” By spotlighting power relations in non-prescriptive ways, Nazareth evokes histories of struggles and resistances that persist today. His works are, at the same time, a collection of facts, stories, and characters at the margins of the historical canon and a visual manifestation of the Afro-Indigenous knowledge underscoring contemporary Brazilian art. Since the beginning of his practice, the artist has been fighting erasure policies and raising awareness of the false dichotomies between what is perceived as popular and contemporary art. In this sense, by showing a rarely seen series of wood carving and handmade artifacts, VUADORA highlights the importance of one of Nazareth’s key references, Mestre Orlando—a master carranca (figurehead) sculptor and his mentor for years—in the tireless counternarratives that Nazareth has been building for the past two decades.  
 

VUADORA’s exhibition design reflects Nazareth’s multi-dimensional movements and fragmented thinking. Conceived as an open dialogue, its format revealed how “escape” is a constant operation performed by the artist; escape as a strategy, fleeting and precise, like the best sorcerers are capable of. His films, performances, interventions, paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptures, like landscapes of memory, seem to gain new or expand their meaning in each context in which they are displayed. 

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VUADORA does not seek an easy way out, it does not promise or project anything, nor is it waiting for the future. VUADORA is already here, is what we already are: bodies in motion but not yet in tune. It is the game, the play, the tongue twister, and the irony of a visuality felt from an Exu-ian and semantic crossroads. Taking shape in the time of the already told and experienced, VUADORA becomes new with each visit; it traverses, it splits, and like Nazareth, it is never fully revealed. As American cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten suggests, to move through and despite what encloses us also means to move the walls out of and beyond the enclosure. 
 

    VUADORA is both spell and riot (arruazsa). There isn’t enough space at Pivô to enclose Paulo Nazareth’s linguistic and visual arsenal. His practice overflows out of and beyond the building, the city and, we hope, the duration of the exhibition.

Diane Lima & Fernanda Brenner