In Rio, young black painters to conquer the art market

April 26, 2023

His easel is set up in front of a window with a breathtaking view of the iconic Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro, but the young Brazilian artist Jota prefers to paint the modest shacks of the favelas.

The works of this 22-year-old self-taught painter are highly prized by collectors in Brazil and abroad.

And he is not the only one: a new wave of young black artists from the favelas or poor suburbs of Rio is beginning to make their mark at contemporary art fairs and in prestigious museums. The most famous of them, Maxwell Alexandre, exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, at the end of 2021.

The world of paintings by Jota, whose real name is Johny Alexandre Gomes, is the favela of Chapadao, where shootings often echo.

The alley leading to his modest two-room apartment is not accessible by car: drug traffickers have installed concrete blocks to prevent the entry of police vehicles.

Jota denounces police violence, painting residents carrying a body wrapped in a bloody sheet or officers with pigs’ heads.

“These are things that need to be shown,” he says.

But he also wants to transmit “another look” on the favela, like the charm of “small houses stacked on top of each other” in the middle of coconut palms.

At 16, Jota was helping his mason uncle on building sites. And it was on cardboard or wooden planks picked up on these construction sites that he made his first works, with inexpensive acrylic paint.

But everything changed when he posted photos of his works on Instagram: he caught the eye of Margareth Telles, founder of the MT Projetos de arte platform, which provides him with his equipment and a workshop in the city center and manages the sale of his works.

At every annual ArtRio contemporary art fair, Jota’s paintings have sold out within hours. During the last edition, in September, you had to pay at least 15,000 reais (about 2,700 euros) for one of his works.

He was thus able to buy a house 100 meters from that of his mother, in Chapadao.

“My life has already improved a lot, but I’m aiming even higher,” said the young artist who has already exhibited in Amsterdam in 2021, after winning the Prince Claus Fund prize.

For Margareth Telles, the emergence of young black artists like Jota is “not a fashion effect”, but a “sustainable movement”, which has its origins in particular in the awareness that followed the George Floyd affair, this afro -American killed by a white police officer in May 2020.

Last year, Jota saw one of his works exhibited at the Masp museum in Sao Paulo, alongside a painting by modernist Candido Portinari, one of the most renowned painters in Brazilian history.

Another representative of this new wave, O Bastardo (“the bastard”), has just inaugurated his first solo exhibition at the Rio Art Museum (MAR).

This 25-year-old painter, who does not wish to reveal his name and cut his teeth in graffiti, stands out in particular for his representations of black personalities such as the couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Basquiat or Martin Luther King, on a blue background. king.

Like Jota, he was raised by a single mother (hence his artist name), and was discovered on Instagram in 2021 by Italian collectors.

“I was in Paris after winning a scholarship at the Beaux-Arts, but I didn’t have a penny and I slept on a friend’s sofa”, says this artist who grew up in Mesquita, a poor suburb north of Rio.

His international fame echoed in Brazil, and he was subsequently represented by major galleries in his country. Today, O Bastardo is struggling to keep up with demand: “with all the orders I have received, I have work for at least five years”.

This corpulent young man with fine dread locks also paints scenes of everyday life in his neighborhood, but with references that he draws from all over the place, sometimes well beyond the borders of Brazil.

In the “Salon de Tia Nenê”, a hairdressing salon, we see for example “a chair where Kanye West sat during a fashion show in Paris and tiles from a destroyed house in Syria” that he had seen in the press.

“Today, the reference for most young black artists in Rio is not Picasso, it’s hip hop culture. It’s a social revolution, which challenges the canons of art” , says Marcelo Campos, chief curator of MAR.