The Brooklyn Rail

Emanoel Araújo was a Brazilian virtuoso abstractionist, a juggernaut of all forms of creativity, and a cultural icon for championing and centering African and Afro-Brazilian traditions, customs, and artists at the forefront of modern culture. He was part of a wave of Brazilian cultural agents, another example being Bispo do Rosário, that have been lost in translation in the annals of anglophone modern art history. Many of his books are only available in Portuguese or are long unavailable to the consumer to purchase online. Press articles on his work and legacy are few and far between. The current show at Jack Shainman is his first major gallery survey in New York since the eighties. Emanoel Araújo’s legacy existed outside of the hyper-commercialized ecosystem of today’s art world, and was grounded in an academic, cultural, and community-centered radical care that created the foundation that a whole new generation of Afro-Brazilian artists have built on.

Araújo’s self-titled show at the Jack Shainman Gallery is bittersweet because the artist was intended to be in attendance at its opening—indeed, Araújo was working on new works to include in the show when he passed last year on September 7, the two-hundredth anniversary of Brazil's emancipation. After this loss, the show morphed into a combination of those newer works he had been creating juxtaposed with the geometric and abstract sculpture that characterized Araújo’s work from the 1970s onwards. In the process of the exhibition’s planning, Jack Shainman Gallery transitioned from working with the artist himself to working to support his estate. The show became less about showcasing the current state of Araújo’s practice and more about communicating a legacy that needs to be preserved.

We might ask what Araújo didn't do in his career, because he navigated between so many creative realms seamlessly. During his artistic career, he worked as a sculptor, designer, costume illustrator, engraver, set designer, painter, curator, collector, and museologist. In the 1960s, Araújo experimented with integrating art and architecture with reliefs in concrete, cement, and marble that he created with architects. These works still exist in lobbies in Bahia. Soon after, he began experimenting with carbon steel sculptures and stainless steel, some works of which are still on view in Salvador.

Araújo’s exhibition at Jack Shainman can be separated into two subsets. First is the work the artist created for the show in the year before his passing. These works are significantly rooted in Afro-Brazilian mysticism and culture, and they appear as an outgrowth of decades of Araújo’s commitment to preserving the culture and history of Brazilians of African descent. These elements of history have been traditionally left out or erased from the national telling of the Brazilian story, though they have profound effects on Brazilian culture at large. The wood-based reliefs Araújo created for this exhibition are carefully curated presentations of cultural artifacts, such as masks, nails, mirrors, beads, glass ornaments, religious figurines, wooden geometric shapes, a vintage globe, and a soda can with the word Jesus written in blue.

The titling of some of the works in this grouping has a nautical bent, translating in some cases to ship or hatch. In his exploration of seafaring, Araújo alludes to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, under which Africans were forcefully removed from their continent to work as enslaved people in the European colonies of the Americas and the Caribbean. In this, parallels can be made to the similar interest in ships we find in the work of Bispo do Rosário or even Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke. Other works in this subset are named after orishas in the traditions of Afro-Brazilian mysticism.

The rest of the show surveys Araújo’s post-1970s explorations in relief and three-dimensional sculpture. Araújo’s creative roots were in woodcut engraved printmaking, a medium of great importance to Brazilian artisan culture. Influenced by his graphic designer background, many of Araújo’s well-known works in the sixties explored two-dimensional shapes and geometries through woodcut printing. This period of the late sixties and seventies was also informed by the rise of pan-African and radical activist theory, leading Araújo to take a trip to the FESTAC 1977 arts festival in Lagos.

Taking this trip to West Africa, a space from where many of Bahia's cultural and religious practices originate, Araújo embarked on a cultural exchange with his creative contemporaries in Africa that altered how he perceived art and its role in society. He became aware that the battleground he was fighting on was the very telling of the story of history: who had the privilege of having their stories, cultures, and customs preserved and who did not? The artist began to include more references to Africa and Afro-Brazilian culture in his compositions and the titles of his works. Araújo began to associate his sculptural works with Paleo-African art, seeing similarities between the way he was stacking shapes and works he encountered on the continent—in a 2017 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Araújo has mentioned Susanne Wenger’s terracotta sculptures dedicated to Oshun, for example. Most importantly, Araújo crystallized his vision of a form of abstractionism that was increasingly divorced from Western art history and rooted in African symbols and geometries. He began to create his own revision of modernism from a solely Afro-Brazilian perspective.

Araújo is best known for founding the Museu Afro Brasil, and he spent his life creating much-needed exhibition spaces for underrecognized Afro-Brazilian artists. He was immensely concerned with Brazil's arts institutions making space for Brazil's Black population, not only as artists but simply as viewers of art. In his community-centered practice, I see a connection to the work of Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre, who in his “Novo Poder” series paints scenes of museum institutions with Black and brown people from the favelas, simply consuming and appreciating art. Alexandre's insistence on inclusion and accessibility in the art institutions of Brazil as a focal point of his art creation, in my opinion, builds on the legacy of Araújo and others like him. The recipes live on.

The sculptures included in Araújo’s show at Shainman are painted in red and black automotive paints. Perhaps a subtle reference to the Candomblé Orisha Elegba, the gatekeeper of the spiritual world and the physical world we live in. Araújo’s sculptures exist as harbingers of worlds beyond the physical realm, outside the rules and limitations of the Western cultural framework and a solely Eurocentric understanding of art history. It feels as though this Shainman exhibition is also Araújo communicating from the afterlife, cementing his legacy, ensuring that his culture is not erased, and making sure the seeds he planted for all these years yield their intended harvest.