Revoada: Antonio Obá at Pinacoteca

Antonio Obá's work starts from the consideration of history, recalling episodes from the past in order to act on them. These are usually landmark events in the struggle for the rights of black people that the artist does not report or illustrate. He locates the characters in a different time - or outside of it - where the subjects have agency beyond the tragic events imposed on them.

His latest exhibitions include Path, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; Antonio Obá: Fables, X Museum, Beijing (2022); Carolina Maria de Jesus, um Brasil para os brasileiros, IMS Paulista, São Paulo (2021); Enciclopédia Negra, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (2021). Today, Obá lives and works in Brasília.

By fusing these hands, Obá teaches the molding procedure at the same time as interpreting the presence of these children in the space; considering the expressive mark of each one. Contained in this gesture is the belief in the collective dimension of memories and in education as a process that guarantees autonomy and freedom. The subjects remember, know and act.

In the exhibition, 20 paintings are organized around the theme of childhood and a movement of suspension, which is very present in Obá's work.

In Banhistas nº 3 - Espreita (2020), Obá refers to an event in June 1964, at the Monson Motor Lodge, Saint Augutine, Florida. Martin Luther King, leader of the anti-segregationist movement, tried to help himself to lunch and was stopped by the manager.

The most famous photograph of this event is by Horace Cort (1913 - 1988), from which Obá paints. In the painting, the manager disappears and a crocodile appears, an allusion to the stories in which enslaved children were used as bait. The children in the scene are on the lookout, they have now become predators.

As we have seen so far, childhood in "Antônio Obá" is not naive. The artist's child characters are agents of their time, aware and capable of transforming the world.

Obá's work is made up of important pillars: the remembrance of historical events - usually milestones in the violence and struggle for rights of black people in the United States - and the attribution of new meanings to these episodes and the educational process.