In her recent and acclaimed book “Staying with the Problem”¹, the North American philosopher Donna J. Haraway introduces her thesis with the following assertion: “‘trouble is an interesting word.”²

Derived from an 18^th-century French verb, when read from an expanded semantical perspective, the word takes on familiar meanings such as “to agitate,” “to instigate,” “to muddle,” “to disturb.”³ Carried over to Emmanuel Nassar’s oeuvre, these synonymous notions with whatever the “trouble” at hand may be encounter fertile ground for conversation.

In over four decades of artmaking, Nassar became established as one of the most emblematic names in Brazil’s contemporary art scene, from the 1980s to the present, precisely because he has positioned his work on dangerously frontier, near-paradoxical ground.

After all, what other Brazilian artist has so deftly and virtuosically conjugated the appropriation of signs from pop language – be it North American or, above all, Brazilian – with an artistic enjoyment also attuned to the echo of our constructive avantgardes of the 1960s and 1970s?

In other words, the title “popcrete,” coined here to designate Nassar’s career, converges with the artist’s own choice to exhibit – in a sort of near-panoramic exhibition – artworks spanning a timeline that extends from the 1980s to 2025. Going back to the multiple meanings of the word trouble outlined by Haraway in her book, it would not be incorrect to argue that, over time, Nassar has been destabilizing the Brazilian art scene by assimilating signs inherent (a priori, at least) to mass culture into strict formal exercises.

Said exercises often endeavor to subvert the typical formal politeness, for instance, of our concrete and neo-concrete artists. By using materials such as metal sheets and other supports from daily life and from his experience as a professional flaneur – through the streets of Belém do Pará, the city he lives and works in –, Nassar stakes his flag on the terrain of painting, even if he stretches it to its most unlikely boundaries.

The proverbial “Nassar ship” bears no connection to the caravels and bateaus that reached our shores back in the 1500s. The subject and Brazil are two perennially omnipresent themes in Emmanuel Nassar’s work. The artist’s territory informs and penetrates his work in a visceral way, whereas he argues: “I was born in Pará, in the heart of Pará, I am my own theme.”⁴

1 In: Haraway, Donna J. “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.” Duke University Press, 2023.

2 Ibidem.

3 Ibidem.

4 In: Scovino, Felipe. Este Norte (This North). Interview with Emmanuel Nassar, 2012.