Portuguese caravels continue to be sighted off the coast of Brazil. Is it a sign of bad omen? Simple signs of a return to the grotesque, seductive forms that bring us beauty and ambiguity. As if small points in history flashed at us announcing danger and repetition.
They remind us of the Great Navigations, the adventures of cowardly heroes, rapes and invasions narrated in the history books with undeniable courage. Current times, as well as the past, are marked by the setback of the rights of native peoples, calamitous environmental policies, authorized chauvinism, bubbling feminicide, thoughts centered on the weapon (War), the fixation on the phallus, the return to Brazil Cologne. There is nothing more phallic than the arrival of Europeans in Brazilian lands.
The Caravels were bellicose vessels, an innovation of the Portuguese who first equipped them with cannons and sails modified to cut the wind more dynamically and get closer to the coast and guarantee conquests. They were a fundamental weapon in the great navigations.
Caravela Portuguesa is also the name of the most poisonous cnidarian.
Seductive, these forms hide the danger they are. Beautiful shapes, rare colors, so natural they look like plastic. A virile, almost pornographic symbol like a used condom that wilts in the face of morality on the sand.
Luso Abuso proposes a phallic invasion, a colonization process that insists on reinventing itself.
This work was exposed for the first time as an urban intervention, in the harbor area of Rio de Janeiro. The region, known today as “Little Africa”, received an estimated 600,000 enslaved Africans and was the most active slave market in Brazil.
The work also had a small circulation in postcard format, experimenting with other ways to invade and arrive through postal art.
For Art Laguna I propose a triptych with a central image of 90x62cm and the two sides with 60x41cm, referring to the three caravels that mythically arrived in Brazil in 1500 (Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta).
The three images will gain thick, golden frames creating a contrast between the current, almost plastic, image and the colonial past.
