Collective Body

/Gabriel Archanjo

Some images open themselves to meaning not only through their compositional complexity, but through their capacity to evoke discourses that move beyond the personal sphere in search of collective identification. Understanding memory as a social construction as well as an intimate one, Gabriel Archanjo develops works in which he intertwines recollections and reminiscences from his own life, subtly aligning them with the complex social context that shapes Brazil. Since the 1990s, Archanjo has made the Brazilian people, their culture, their challenges, and their everyday resilience central to his production.

Born in Piauí, the artist has moved across different fields, including poetry, music, and the visual arts. His recent work now points to a growing predilection for painting. In a process that fuses the personal and the collective, Archanjo adopts different working strategies, including the use of his own photographic archive. His most recent series, produced in small formats, revisits the female figures who marked his personal history. Motivated by the desire to recover portraits of the women at the center of his family life, the artist turned to those images and began developing new interpretations from this material.

Over white handkerchiefs—objects charged with personal significance—the artist reproduces the faces of these women, consistently emphasizing the striking expressiveness of their features. In a kind of inventory of memories, the connection to the past is intensified by fluid and, at times, diffuse compositions, in which these figures seem to float as specters.

In 2023, after being invited by director Douglas Machado to produce illustrations for the film A Carta de Esperança, the works from the Icono series gained a new layer of complexity. Esperança Garcia, one of the thousands of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Piauí, became known for her resistance to the inhumane treatment to which she was subjected. With the rare privilege of writing, she addressed a letter to the governor of Piauí denouncing the mistreatment suffered by her and other women at the hands of their “masters.” In this account, Garcia claims her own subjecthood. Her letter not only restores her humanity but also removes her from the condition of a mere statistic, granting her an identity of her own. There is no visual record of Esperança; her letter is her portrait. Working from this context, Gabriel began to expand his work, portraying women from his family as well as women from his surroundings and connecting them, through his images, to his ancestor, now considered the first female lawyer in Brazil.

Although Icono focuses specifically on portraiture, Archanjo’s production also includes compositions of a surreal and mysterious nature. Within these works, some of his figures appear in relation to one another, while others are uncanny and melancholic, as if wandering through the crowd, full of questions. Archanjo does not simply paint people; he turns them into protagonists of a larger history, one in which collective memory gains form and visibility.

Although at first glance these works may seem confined to the realm of the fantastic, a closer look reveals that they are deeply connected to reality. In the images, the characters appear as integral parts of their environments. This can be seen, for example, in the repetition of pointillist compositions, which merge the background and the bodies of the figures, or, in other cases, in the creation of large circular and fluid areas from which silhouettes composed of a single material emerge.

These are interpretations of everyday images, often ordinary ones, set against the backdrop of the historical impositions to which we have been subjected. Scenes emerge in which short biblical excerpts float like silent presences around Black and Indigenous figures, evoking the influence of Christianity in the formation of Brazilian culture and the fragmentation of other traditions under its hegemonic force. In small details, such as the way an Indigenous figure holds and interacts with a monkey, we can perceive the artist’s attentive gaze toward others and toward their traditions.

Through delicate gestures, Archanjo develops his work with a strong political dimension, inviting us to revisit the symbols of Brazilian culture. His work reveals both the marks of oppression in our social fabric and the strength of our resistance.