Geneva offers Antonio Obá his first retrospective

Antonio Obá is today an internationally renowned artist whose paintings command high prices. As far as we can get our hands on it. It is particularly favored by François Pinault, who exposed it in his Trade exchange Parisian in 2021 and did not wish to take down the four paintings from the walls of her living room to lend them to CAC (Geneva Contemporary Art Center).

But thanks to the support of the gallery Mendes Wood DMwho represents the Brazilian visual artist, and Flux Laboratorythe institution has set up at the end of Lake Geneva the first retrospective in Europe dedicated to this protean creator, born in 1983 in Ceilândia in a modest and Catholic environment.

Entitled “Rituals of Care”, this very successful exhibition – which will also be the last before the closure of the building for work lasting at least three years – extends over two floors. It shows the richness of Antonio Obá’s practice which encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance. This abundant work develops a statement imbued with spirituality, making the body its central subject and claiming an African heritage in a society which, historically, “has always sought to dilute black culture”, as the CAC indicates in its presentation.

Christian iconography

Youth research is closely linked to Christian iconography. “Extremely religious, Obá almost entered the seminary,” explains Andrea Bellini, director of the Geneva Art Center. Ultimately, he trained in the arts, and taught drawing for fifteen years, before his artistic career truly began. The visual artist was then still called Antonio de Paula – he would later give himself the surname Obá, meaning “king”, in Yoruba. Lamb, crosses, silhouettes as if printed on shrouds, several works on the second floor show how much the religious question preoccupied him.

Other symbols and rituals are also mixed in, in an uninhibited syncretism. The installation “Malungo” (2016), for example, features a wooden altar where a golden chalice and a bottle of cachaça stand between two black candles, in front of walls covered with gold leaf; on the ground, pieces of coal mingle with statuettes of saints, legacies of colonialism, and orixás, deities originating from West Africa.

By associating icons that have shaped contemporary Brazil, the visual artist treats the various beliefs as equals and questions the identity of his people: how can we know where we come from when we are descended from a line of slaves of whom none register does not bear any trace of existence?

Racism constitutes an important theme in his work, where the black body, often his own, willingly half-naked, occupies an essential place. Moreover, a performance during which, in 2016, he covered his skin with white powder (material resulting from the crushing of a statue of the Virgin) caused such an outpouring of hatred that he was exiled to Brussels for a few months.

What followed was a series of large paintings, a medium that Antonio Obá mastered and particularly liked. Very inhabited, inventive and colorful, full of mysterious signs, his paintings often represent characters asleep or under the effect of a spell – or are they dead? – with the recurring figure of Eshu, the central god of Brazilian Candomblé, identifiable in the paintings by the fact that he always wears a red element.

Political echoes

Sometimes, personal memories provide a political echo to collective memory. Like when a 4-year-old girl killed by the police in a favela takes the place of a portrait of Saint Anthony in a family scene inspired by a childhood photo (“Requiem”). Elsewhere, the three Graces become death, life and courage, with a sacrificial lamb at their feet, while, further away, a group of adolescents dance in lace panties in a cotton field.

Virtuoso without being demonstrative, his brushwork uses, here, neo-impressionist touches and, there, is expressionist, naive or decorative, bordering on kitsch. In a flood of mythological or cosmogonic references the dignity of black humanity blossoms, reconstituting its past to better project itself into its future, with rituals as the final act of resistance.

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