Three moments about cunning, smiles, musicality, and painting.

Tarcisio Almeida | Three moments on astuteness, smiles, musicality, and painting, 2024

"Is there any way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held together by the idea of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—of being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, old people sitting on a porch, people working together in a factory—there are various modes of activity out there. Calling them ‘study’ serves to mark the fact that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already there. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, ‘oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could say you were studying.’ To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that it has been this way all along—because recognition allows access to a whole varied alternative history of thought." (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten - Studying through the undercommons, 2012)

1.

Many scenes are suggested here: in some, characters are perceived in deep intimacy with the landscape; in others, the collective space either heralds a sense of the crowd or celebrates a communal making, whether through ritual or festivities. There are scenes where the diffuse gaze of the characters merges with other bodies, making the mass of paint the protagonist. Golden points stand out, revealing jewelry and coats of arms in positions of abundance. There are also characters who appear in the foreground, posing for the artist who exalts their pleasure. Two Black girls braid an elder lady's hair, who is also braiding the hair of another young woman. She presents a knowledge that ebbs and flows in an endless cycle—the elder teaches, the younger learns and dialogues with the elder, Guilherme Almeida repeats.

In this play of "apparently" everyday overlaps, the flowers present in baskets and vases emerge as witnesses to a trait common to them all: a making permeated by performativity and dexterity that traces back to historicities inscribed in the body itself. That which is "apparent," in turn, deserves a bit more rest; for if we enter this delicate threshold between pigment and support, we realize that therein lies the creation of a refined strategy of survival and transmission. In other words, it is as if we could say "to touch is to write," "to braid is to philosophize," "to cook is to teach." And it is upon these intellectual frameworks of African origin, present in the daily lives and social practices of Salvador, that Almeida aims his astuteness.

These embodied gestures, where the body becomes the guiding thread, find their maxim in the thought of Leda Maria Martins, who repeats in different ways: the body is the canvas where the marks of history are inscribed. The body—this set of forms and forces—is presented no longer as a simple physical instrument, but as a field where memories and knowledge interweave with its own singularity. Each movement, each shared moment is transformed into a timbre where skin overlaps the base, and the act of transmitting and teaching are the chromatic lines of a celebration always woven and desired. "My hypothesis is that the body in performance is not only the expression or representation of an action [...] but primarily a site for the inscription of knowledge, a knowledge that is written in gesture, movement, choreography [...] In this sense, what repeats in the body does not repeat merely as habit, but as a technique and procedure of inscription, recreation, transmission, and revision of the memory of knowledge," reinforces the thinker when reflecting on Afro-Brazilian ritualities.

2.

This rhythmic repetition, the result of incorporating multiple temporalities, is the same that carries the ungovernable and transgressive character of these gestures of sociability. It is through touch and in the search for a certain philosophy of touch—to paraphrase Harney and Moten (Hapticality, or love)—that we touch one another. Pictorial expressions here approach a textuality through touch. Hapticality is what governs space-time in a way that manifests traces flowing from each of these experiences, each challenging containment through a composition of gestures, materials, affects, and intensities. And for us to co-habit this dimension of touch, no longer as an abandoned space, we must consider that what is broken will remain broken and cannot be repaired. And love is needed against the ‘logisticality’ that manages subjectivities and knowledge; we plot our small and dispersive everyday revolutions, we, the embarked, the philosophers remind us. This same touch, a legacy of historical brutality, is now the very tactic unforeseen in the writing of official texts. And it is under it, from it, that movements of dissonance, noise, trepidation, disorientation, fugitivity, and dispossession begin to coexist.

The authors also speak to us of hapticality as a capacity to feel with/for the other, through the skin. They tell us of a common solidarity: a sense of feeling others feeling you. A feeling that cannot be felt individually, nor collectively as something homogeneous. A sensation that cannot be fixed in a territory, state, nation, history, or institution. These traces here, drumming in a brilliant texture made of astute and golden smiles, can also be read through their tactile insurgency; though denied affects, history, and home, we feel (for) ourselves in one another. To be touched is to touch language, to touch the eternal oscillation and alternation. In this context, artistic practice becomes an act of reification, a form of document based on listening, fusion, and the dissolution of subject and object—gestures widely experimented with in this mode of knowing.

3.

The synthesized forms in this set of paintings, the first in the "Desfrutar o Tambor" (Enjoying the Drum) series, also announce a conduct implicated and applied to the very idea of technique. Here, techniques commonly associated with a way of making and recording are not restricted to the regimes of mimesis—that is, of repetition for the same—but rather as a generative form of differences, making the act of touching, eating, braiding, celebrating, and worshiping a gesture of constant study.

The expressions and moments edited by the artist are not limited to visuality, as they can be extended to the domains of the sensible and are not easily described by the fields of formal language. From this place, the working procedures that Guilherme Almeida elaborates intersect, ranging from the recovery of historical moments decisive for the Bahian territory protagonized by Black Communities to the presence of a personal archive of memories that tell of his participation in these cultural, pedagogical, and family spaces.

By understanding painting as an editing suite, where news clippings and photographs are predominant elements, the artist repeats montage strategies to project his compositional practice. The use of newspapers as a support attests to this "life of things," tensioning a desire to expand the place of painting while, actively, inserting new layers of meaning into what is being broadcast. "And one must have the courage to state loudly that we can repeat things," the voice of Édouard Glissant reminds us; I think repetition is one of the forms of knowledge of our world; it is by repeating that we begin to see the signs of a novelty that begins to appear.

In this system, nothing goes unnoticed. The contrast between bright and opaque colors, the suggested faces, and the haughty angle of the figures reinforce what Mestre Pastinha seems to have already taught us: a generational commitment, in which the artist inscribes himself, by understanding painting as a process of documenting contexts, communities, histories, and ancestries. This sonic enjoyment that we find also speaks of the audacity of pleasure as an ethical practice in advocating for a body (singular and collective) that knows and feels.