Arjan Martins | Descompasso Atlântico

A Gentil Carioca is pleased to present Arjan Martins' second solo show at the gallery. Descompasso Atlântico (The Mazed Atlantic), reiterate the artist's navigation through a history of symbolic, political, cultural and existential resistance and reflux of blacks of African descent transplanted by colonial slavery. Martins is interested in the representation of dissolved, almost liquid faces. As cleaned by the waters of the Atlantic, which became for more than three and a half centuries a great cemetery for enslaved people. The transit of these black waters goes through stories from the most intimate to the macro cultural significance of this transposition. These are portraits that are completed only with the presence and imagination of the spectator. Not by chance, April 22nd, the exhibition's launch date, is the same date of the colonizers' arrival in these lands.

A peculiar intersection between figuration and intangible, implicated in his production, appears in the representation of dissolved, almost liquid faces. This ocean is only completed in the viewer's presence and imagination. In such a way, "It is impossible to say whether they cry or smile, but one intuits the fact that they inhabit everyday life; they walk, they work, they study, they remember, and they dream. Whether Brazilian, North American or European, they are all children of the diaspora, and the way that Arjan Martins represents them points to this connection even as it recognizes that their existence goes beyond the task of remembering the trauma of colonial violence."

Thus, Arjan Martins crosses through different semantic fields and leaves us with symbolic equations in suspension to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Miyada attests,"This also intensifies the wisdom implicit in the work of Arjan Martins, whose poetic project envisions the unrestricted navigation of the waters of the black ocean, whether traveling between historical periods or journeying between different latitudes and longitudes bathed by slave traffic."

*excerpts from  Negro Oceano by Paulo Miyada, written for the book Arjan Martins published by Cobogó.

Parallel to the gallery's physical space, and also as an external and public action of the show, in partnership with Alalaô (an artistic-political-affective mobilization that takes to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro interventions, performances and several artistic actions), Arjan Martins carries to Ipanema the windsocks installation, exhibiting devices destined to indicate the direction of the winds, which merge the maritime flags, and their international codes to transmit messages between vessels and ports, which reveal specific meanings and enable the viewer a sensitive reading of technical terms.