ZMR VS. TMM

The flame of chaos reaches every corner: animals and people run, the appetites of the flesh blaze, limbs stiffen, ears prick up, whirlwinds and roars resound, embraces and consummations unfold. A thunderous sound rises, colossal in force, and soon arrows whistle, blades gleam, wars erupt, caravels appear in the bays and tractors in the forests, a single-minded annihilation. Through convergence or distinction, through passion and procreation or through brutal destruction, compositions and contrasts emerge: the fear of the abyss and the abundance of nature. The lights of the stars shine on the waters that bathe the soils, which conceal fossils, once dental arches full of tongues. Enchanted beings and songs, gunshots and drums, monsters and tides from Maranhão. A thousand screams, roars, and bellows erupt, confronting the astonishment of existence itself. They pass through rib cages, rise through throats, gather momentum and, in a fatal impulse, make the bones of mouths tremble, finding release into the world. This ascent inevitably reaches the sky. Final act: the voices transmute from matter into cosmic dust, dissolving into the creative energy that moves the mechanism of the whole and echoes through the vastness of infinity.

Lima Galeria’s project for SP-Arte Rotas Brasileiras 2023 brings together the work of two Maranhão-born artists with distinct backgrounds and practices, yet united by the same creative vigor: Zimar and Thiago Martins de Melo. Titled Mil cabeças sob a apoteose do último céu (A Thousand Heads Beneath the Apotheosis of the Last Sky), the project gathers recent works by both artists in a harmonious composition, giving rise to an apotheotic scene.

Zimar’s production, whose scale and force have earned him recognition as a master, is grounded in his experience as a brincante of the Cazumba in Bumba Meu Boi, Maranhão’s largest cultural manifestation. The Cazumba plays an important role within the narrative structure of the Boi. It carries no defined gender and belongs to no biological species. It is neither human nor animal, but a magical being. In folklore, its role is to open the circle and set the brincadeira in motion, interacting directly with the public and with the other characters. Its figure, half man and half beast, always bears a striking expression, producing both fright and enchantment, surprise and amusement. The Cazumba is known for its caretas, complex and elaborate masks, and for its fardas, ornate garments that are always vivid and colorful. It often carries a badalo, a small bell used to call the ox, played rhythmically and incessantly.

As a participant in the Bois-bumbás of his city, especially Boi Flor de Matinha, Zimar makes caretas, or queixos, as these masks are also called, as objects capable of activating other possible existences. The vitality of his creative force gives rise to unprecedented couplings and hybrid forms. He creates heads for those who embody transmutation itself, transforming the brincantes into magical beings of an inexpressible nature. Through the handling of diverse materials in a practice as virtuosic as it is antidisciplinary, the artist gives form to images that appear in dreams or in observations of the world, incarnating his monstrous figures in matter. Each careta bears highly particular characteristics and affirms a subjectivity of its own. Together, they form countless distinct personalities, autonomous parts of a great family brought together by a shared language, the result of the style of a major artist.

The work of Thiago Martins de Melo carries equally distinctive features. Grounded in imaginative freedom, narrative vividness, and visual explosion, his creations bring together figuration and abstraction, political commentary and free fantasy, historical reflection and biographical confession. Vertiginous speed, critical sharpness, mythological breadth, and narrative excess converge in the dense materiality of painting. His works are thick on the surface and radically deep in content, proposing a chaotic, circular, and anachronistic form of storytelling. The artist’s neo-baroque language reaffirms violence as a point of incision from which to address human horrors and sociopolitical urgencies, while also illuminating spiritual experiences and life’s continual capacity for reinvention.

Both artists take universal objects and symbols of Brazilian culture as the basis for singular creations of great expressive force. At the charged threshold where terror and joy meet, they work through the monstrosity of matter with existential transcendence in mind. In this unprecedented encounter between their productions, the heightened intensities of each artist come together in a dramatic arrangement, composing an atmosphere-charged environment, like a ritual space or force field for the circulation of multiple characters and narratives. On the line between the mundane and the mystical, the gore and the gothic, battles and festivities, Maranhão monsters and their mysteries, there is the inescapable brutality of earthly existence and, above all, the plurality of forms, the untamed revelry, and the joy of living.