EXPOSITION;
Antonio Oba, Rituals of care
16 November - 16 February
Centre D'art Contemporain de Geneve, Switzerland
Curated by : Andrea Bellini
Reported by: Nazli Kok Akbas
NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul
Antonio Oba , Uma Alegoria Morta-Vida :Coragem , 2024,Oil on canvas
"Moving the earth, harvesting, knowing plants by smell, by name, by the design of the leaves, seeing animals, catching runaway chickens, helping with the housework, grating corn to make pamonha, walking silently in the woods…
An imperial inheritance connects me to the departed ones."
Antonio Oba
Antonio Oba, born in 1983 in Ceilandia, Brazil, is an artist who has been much talked about in recent years, but rarely seen.
His first retrospective in Europe was 'Outros Oficios', which translates as 'Other Trades' 2021, organized by Mendes Wood Gallery, Brussels, and was the first opportunity for European audiences to experience Oba's practice in all its colourful complexity.
Antonio Oba, Sankofa: Cavaleiro, 2022,(oil on canvas), Private collection Asie. Sankofa, a West African symbol, consists of a bird with its head turned backwards and its feet pointing forward, suggesting that only by understanding what has come before us can we move into the future. In his painting Sankofa: Cavaliero, 2022, Oba transforms the Sankofa into a kind of chimera that is man/horse.
The painting shows a rural landscape with a man astride a horse, but backwards.The man's eyes are little balls of light, the colour seems to change as you look at it.These balls also swarm the scene like fireflies.Everything is easily readable, but strange and dreamy, hallucinatory...
In this painting, Angelus, 2022, Oba quotes another work of art, Fire on Marlborough Street, 1975, a news photograph by Stanley Forman.
This photograph shows a woman and her child falling from a collapsed fire escape; the tragedy suffered by the woman and her child is transformed here, as they seem to be falling playfully from the sky into deep purple water.
Geneva Centre for Contemporary Art
Curated by Andrea Bellini
Reported by Nazli Kok Akbas
NKA ART REPORTS SWITZERLAND-FRANCE-ISTANBUL
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