No Martins: Brazilian Contemporary Art in London's Jack Bell Gallery (EN)

As the largest civil rights movement of our generation echoes through the art world, the Jack Bell Gallery presents ‘Social Signs’, a solo show of Brazilian contemporary artist No Martins (15 June to 10 July 2020, by appointment only), focused on the Black experience within an urban architecture of violence.

Installation shots © Jack Bell Gallery

No Martins was born in 1987 in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo – where I am from. With over 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo has been called a ‘megametropolis’ for its status as one of the world’s most populous urban areas. In the exhibition’s excellent critical text, curator Diane Lima refers to the city as a necropolis, drawing on the term coined by Achille Mbembe to describe “the political power and capacity to dictate who has the right to live or not”. São Paulo’s reality is very much shaped by this paradigm, as urban governance policies act as a war against the “black urban poor” through police killings, economic marginalisation, and mass incarceration – themes that Martins tackles head-on in his work.

Martins’ painting practice demonstrates the proximity of this technique with those of graffiti and ‘pixação’/‘pixo’ (terms that describe particular urban spray-painting cultures in Brazil), central elements of hip hop culture that were the primary artistic forms of expression used by the artist in his experience navigating the space of the city. The artist’s poetic narrative incorporates urban visual elements such as street signs, newspaper headlines, advertising images and surveillance cameras that invite us to think through what Lima calls “regimes of seeing and being seen”. Commenting on Martins’ earlier work, curator Hélio Menezes discusses how the artist puts the spectator in a position of direct observation of the depicted scenes, implicating the viewer with a sense of responsibility. I would argue this artistic device can also be seen in connection to the hyper-visibility of violence for those in targeted areas such as favelas, which contrasts with the privilege of turning a blind eye that the distance (both physical and social) from violence affords the elites with. Martins addresses the dissonances of inequality both in relation to wider social issues and in terms of his career. In 2019, as part of his show at the Galeria Baró (SP), the artist included a turnstile at the entrance as a symbol of the access restrictions he and his have faced, but that those who consume his art in a gallery in an elite neighbourhood are often oblivious to. Interviewing No in this video, Adriana Couto describes the artist’s trajectory from the periphery of São Paulo to a gallery in an elite neighbourhood as a ‘mined field’ – in reference to Martins’ painting ‘Campo Minado’ (2019), now at Jack Bell.

No Martins, Campo Minado, 2019, acrylic on metal and canvas © the artist

This double self-portrait depicts the artist both as a crossed over silhouette in a street sign and in a full-body depiction where he faces away from us with his hands against the wall, in the context of a police frisking. The proximity of these two images articulates both how access is denied and how that denial is reinforced. Around these portraits, we see signs for ‘gallery’ and ‘university’, as well as “the entrance of strange people is strictly forbidden” (a sign commonly found in the streets of São Paulo). Similarly, a panel on the lower left corner reads “the circulation of individuals outside the standard/norm is forbidden". Here, the artist tackles the theme of geographical and social divisions along racial lines and the difficulties of access delimitated by these parameters, be that in the field of art, education or simply freedom of movement in the city. In the central image, the number 13 indicates the age when the artist was first approached by the police in a frisking. A similar pictorial device is employed in ‘Um dia da caça, outro do caçador’ (2020) (free translation: one day for the hunted, another for the hunter), where the letters ‘J17’ are printed on a large pig carried by a young black man – in reference to current president Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign number (17) and his disdain for black lives made explicit in his discourse.

No Martins, Um dia da caça, outro do caçador, 2020, acrylic on canvas © the artist The comment about power dynamics extends from this work to Estratagema (2020), where Martins represents a black man sitting across himself before a game of chess comprised solely of white pieces – an image Lima highlights in her text as an allegory for the creation of strategies of freedom. This work is in dialogue with his earlier sculpture ‘Rules of the Game’ (2018), shown at the SP Arte fair in 2019, where Martins represents Brazil as a chess board in which the ‘court’ is made up solely of white pieces – an allusion to the control of the country’s powers by a small elite contingent of its white population. Around this privileged centre, the marginalised black pawns stand in a stark contrast that very much illustrates the urban geographies and power dynamics of a country with sharp socio-racial inequalities rooted in the historically largest slavery regime worldwide.

No Martins, Estratagema (left), 2020, acrylic on canvas & Rules of the Game, 2018, acrylic paint on wood and plastic © the artist

The relationship between ‘Estratagema’ and ‘Rules of the Game’ demonstrate Martins’ integration of his work on canvas with other artistic media, including sculpture, installation, performances, videos, metal etching and painting on unconventional surfaces such as used truck tarps and money bills. Discussing painting on tarps, the artist described how used objects contain a history of their own, and compared the patching of tears in the fabric to the scars of the lived stories he represents on them. In a series called ‘Pra Ver se Dão Valor’ (free translation: to see if they’ll value it), Martins’ storytelling is once again intertwined with the specificities of his chosen medium. Here, he produces portraits of Black subjects on money bills both as a reminder of the use of black bodies as a currency during slavery, and as a way to question the prevalence of white faces on the currencies of countries with a majority black population, painting over the Graeco-roman style faces printed on Brazilian Real notes.

No Martins, Pra ver se dão valor series, unknown date, acrylic paint on money bill © the artist

Martins’ work is in dialogue with both the content and aesthetics of newspaper headlines and statics that evidence black genocide in Brazil. In one of the paintings in his series #JáBasta (#Enough), the portrait of a black man is surrounded by cut-out newspaper headlines such as “police fired over 100 shots against car of dead young men in Rio" or “army fires 80 shots against family car in Rio and kills musician”. The large scale of this series draws on his previous work on street art murals, but also adds to its significance as a ‘silent scream’ against genocide, as the artist puts it.

No Martins, Já Basta III, Já Basta series © the artist

Also on display at the gallery is the painting ‘Discipline and Punish’ (2020), a representation of the threat black populations face from a very young age, reflected in the use of violence by the state against black youths in the country (as Lima mentions in her text, a young black man dies ever 23 minutes in Brazil). The words ‘Order and Progress’, painted on the bottom of the canvas are the same ones written across the Brazilian flag, framing this painting as a portrait of a country where the main state resource directed at black people is the police, while state spending on social benefits and basic quality of life are absurdly low. Unfortunately, this painting recalls multiple events in which police violence has resulted in the death of innocent children, the most recent cases being João Pedro Mattos, 14, who was killed when the police shot at his home 70 time (Rio de Janeiro, 18 May 2020) and Guilherme Silva Guedes, 15, who was found dead with multiple shots and signs of torture in São Paulo (15 July 2020), sparking protests.

No Martins, Discipline and Punish, 2020, acrylic on canvas © the artist

The multitude of tragedies like these binds Martins’ immense artistic talent to the representation of his indignation. As Lima reminds us, the artist has been forged by an environment that inscribes him historically in a tradition of denunciations – “an extensive chapter found in the history of black aesthetics in the Americas, waters of the Atlantic and overseas”. Denouncing violence and proclaiming resistance is a stance taken by other Brazilian contemporary artists, such as Maxwell Alexandre, who has portrayed the danger posed by police violence to black children by painting bloody public school shirts, which became a symbol for cases like this after the death of Marcos Vinícius da Silva, 14, who was shot in the Maré favela and died in his school uniform.

As Claudinei Roberto points out, social preoccupation as a pattern in Brazilian art has generated iconic works since the time of military dictatorship (1964-1985), and sustained after its breakdown. As Roberto argues here, Martins is part of this ‘artistic family’ that “breaks apart from the prejudice with content-focused art in favour of plastic narratives of strong social and denunciative character”, putting his name besides those of Sidney Amaral, Moisés Patrício and Rosana Paulino, who was Martins’ teacher in 2007 and curator of his work in the ‘Black Poetics’ show, at SENAC LAPA (SP, Brazil) in 2018. Also in 2018, Martins’ work was included in São Paulo’s Art Museum (MASP) show ‘Afro-atlantic Histories’ (Histórias Afro-atlânticas), alongside works of these artists. Martins' work was part of a section dedicated to resistance and activism, within an exhibition "motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories – their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy".

Here, I give the description of Martins’ work included in this show, shared by the Tomie Ohtake Institute on social media. ‘Vilões’ (Villains), 2017, “portrays five black children in a narrow street with simple constructions that recalls the periphery neighbourhoods of East São Paulo, where the artist was born and raised”. “Above their heads, three pairs of red and blue circles – the colours of the camburão (a police van for the transportation of detainees) sirens, in lieu of clouds over a dark grey sky – announce the latent danger of a police approach”. "The title of the work refers firstly to the inhabitants of these areas (often referred to as ‘vilas’) who, (…) in the eyes of the police, are seen as a character that should be combatted. It also refers to the common slang used by young people in these areas who call each other by that term in a friendly tone".

The persistence of Martins’ hashtag affirm ‘it’s enough!!!’ is a testament to the fact that the current level of violence against black bodies in Brazil is not only intolerable as it stands, but has been persistently pushed beyond limits of absurdity and cruelty for too long. In his work ‘Extra Tie’ (2019), Martins includes the hashtag #JáBasta below the silhouette of a man wearing a tie printed with the Brazilian flag and the logo of supermarket called ‘Extra’, where 19 year-old Pedro Henrique Gonzaga was killed by a security guard who asphyxiated him using the jiujitsu choke hold called “tie blow” in Portuguese, which he references in the title. Here, the artist addresses not only this episode, but the banality of murders like this in a country that awards so many the authorisation to kill and rewards the use of violence with impunity.

“Human life is disposable in Brazil” – in the words of the 1990s rap group Racionais.

This is not and cannot be a light-hearted review. While these turbulent times initially reaffirmed the value of art as room for fantasy and escapism, this social moment has evolved to include relevant protests and cries for structural social change that underline the relevance of works such as Martins’ and of shows such as ‘Social Signs’.

No Martins, Dia do Descrobrimento, 2019 (acrylic paint and gold leaf on canvas) © the artist