Arjan Martins presents an extended panorama of this Rio de Janeiro painter's trajectory. In his work, the artist creates a dialogue with the modern tradition of Western painting, incorporating an African-Brazilian visual and narrative repertoire. His Black figures' faces are often blurred with paint and anxious and elegant strokes. While recalling an erased identity, they translate the denial of image/identity with gestures multiplying the expressive directions contained in the form. The images of immigrants and people of African descent are a fundamental part of the artist's repertoire, showing them in mundane actions, to which they bring prominent questions to discuss: colonial heritage, ethnic identity, Blackness, segregation, invisibility. His works also include cartographies, arriving as significative elements of the Age of Exploration. Arjan Martins's work has been exhibited in many of Brazil's most important institutions, as well as important international fairs, such as the Dakar Biennale and the Mercosul Biennale.
"Neither root nor rhizome, Arjan Martins's language is crossing and ocean." - Paulo Miyada.
The publication features over 100 of the artist's works, as well as an essay by the book's editor, Paulo Miyada, currently curator for the Tomie Ohtake institute in São Paulo, another essay by art historian Michael Asbury, and an interview with Arjan Martins, conducted by historian Raquel Barreto.
