Identidade Fragmentada / Fragmented Identity

Os tons, os mil tons, seus sons e seus dons geniais / Nos salvam, nos salvarão dessas trevas /

E nada mais? || The tones, the thousand tones and his genial gifts / Save us, will save us from this darkness // and nothing more?

Beauty in Brazil is a cracked mirror. Fragmented by a colonial past, and the decades of suffering that have accompanied it, and at the same time bound together, if only in the most fragile way, by the tenacity of its own resistance. To look into this cracked mirror is to look at a reflection of oneself always between worlds, never whole. At the same time that I, and the people around me, attempt to hang on desperately, perhaps even futilely, to some sense of our own culture, we also find ourselves swept in the waves of a world that consistently tells us not to look back.

Enquanto os homens exercem seus podres poderes / Índios e padres e bichas, negros e mulheres / E adolescentes fazem o carnaval || While the men exercise their powers powers / Natives and priests and fags, blacks and women / And teenagers make the carnival

With Identidade Fragmentada, I explore the manifestations of beauty in my country, and the tensions within that beauty. Our beauty is always in a state of oscillation. It’s a plastic beauty. The beauty of pop divas, of full makeup, of human barbie dolls. And yet, at the same time, it’s an organic beauty, a beauty true to the self, a beauty that lies at the intersection of past and history, a beauty driven by identity. Our beauty is both of these, and yet neither. It’s a queer beauty, one of both resistance and assimilation.

Os olhos cheios de cores / O peito cheio de amores vãos || With my eyes, so colorful /And with my heart, full of vain loves

For in a country like Brazil, both to accept or to deny your culture is an act of rebellion. The lyrics at the bottom of these paintings are from songs by Caetano (himself bisexual), one of the most famous rock stars in Brazil, and one of the founders of the Tropicalia movement. Tropicalia was a force of rebellion by the youth, who fought against the dictatorship. And yet, Caetano was unabashedly nationalistic, his message a clear call to Brazilians to return to our roots, to our organic beauty if you will.

As garras da felina me marcaram o coração / Mas as besteiras de menina que ela disse não || Her feline claws left a mark in my heart / But the girlish foolishness in her words did not

Tropicalia was a movement founded on the intersection of the old and the new. At the same time that it embraced the often absurd audiovisual aesthetics of the traditional Brazilian imaginary, it also embraced the physically distant world of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the counterculture movement that had swept the United States, and the world. Artists like Caetano and Gilberto Gil wanted to craft a new Brazilian identity: a blend of tradition and modernity, north and south.

Menino vadio / Tensão flutuante do Rio / Eu canto pra Deus proteger-te || Stray boy // Rio’s Floating tension / I sing to God to protect you

Now, we find our resistance in the queer clubs of Brazil, where drag queens sing along fearlessly to Lady Gaga—even as they are murdered on the streets. We too find ourselves negotiating our identity between the past and the present. Everyone around me, and the subjects of my paintings, find themselves caught within this tension. What does it mean to be a woman in Brazil? What does it mean to be queer in Brazil? What does it mean to be Brazilian in the first place?

To place the words of Caetano beneath these paintings is to recognize the inherent tension within these questions, and within the meaning of resistance itself. In many ways, it could be said that the current generation in Brazil has made the plastic culture around us our own, even though we know it will never be real.

Perhaps then, to accept the glimpses of organic beauty within the cracked mirror of our plastic beauty, is also to accept ourselves.