From the 17^th century to the end of the 19^th, History Painting was the fundamental genre. Religious, mythological, allegorical, or literary themes would be commissioned to promote the honor of the State, the Church, and the bourgeoisie. Through Painting, scenes would be inscribed onto the social imaginary that would sediment the moral, political, and intellectual interests of those who vied for power. The line that separated artisans from artists would be drawn: the handling of compositions with multiple figures would be required; a command of anatomy, of perspective, of the expression of passions; and, above all, erudite knowledge. If the purpose of History is to erase the narrative of those defeated, this type of Painting accomplished it masterfully, in theme as well as technique.

Thiago Martins de Melo dislocates the genre that was the very emblem of academic hierarchy and inscribes it into a logic in which no Painting is worth more than another. He monumentalizes the insurgents, the dead from colonization, while it portrays as monsters those who would have commissioned Paintings about their victory in the past. Building on cosmologies from the Global South, he builds an oeuvre in which colonial violence, the myth, and resistance take place as surplus pictorial matter. Upon the surface of the canvas, executioners, subjugated bodies, and mythical forces interact anachronistically, in times that never crossed paths. Juxtaposed, simultaneous scenes function as shots and reverse shots in a panorama tensioned by narrative depth and material density. At times, Thiago lets out these accumulated stories through video, as if Painting were not enough. That is not the case here.

The large canvases hypersaturated with layers of impastos, figures, superimpositions, and sculptures covered in oil paint coexist with a series of small-scale works. In the face of such profusion, the small Paintings operate through subtraction — they are removed from the synchronic narrative of History Painting. That which, in the large canvas, is read as simultaneity, opens up into time in the fragment: each scene calls for its own instant, and the spectator’s path creates between them a reading that no longer obeys the order of the account.

Singlehandedly, they are more than têtes d’expression — academic exercises in physiognomy, studies to be incorporated into the full narrative of the painted panorama. His swift, urgent gesture is ultimately compounded in the expressive movements, like fiery embers. The suspended instant, in a spasm, creates meaning through shock, a spark that turns the will-o’-the-wisp into myth. In the interval between one Painting and the other, meaning is produced through the triggering of conflicts. The minuscule is pitted against the monumental, the isolated face against the saturated canvas, the vast bonfire against the dark night.

In Thiago Martins de Melo’s Painting, this type of assembly of attractions is also set up through contrasting procedures hitherto deemed incompatible. It introduces dissent into the very act of making. When squeezed directly from the tube, the paint shoots out like a line over the detailed gesture that tends toward realism. Agile brushstrokes delimit the instability of the scenes. In the skies, darkness is torn apart by the temperature of the purplish-reds, of the luminous pink that bursts through the pitch black. Night competes with day. The tone of an uncertain hour puts the Painting in a state of wakefulness. The flame warms the bodies of paint, the bonfire colors the background with smoke, the landscape trembling in a mirage.

Without hierarchy, the surface evidences the figures on the same plane and volumizes the paint to the limit. The oil in relief advances over the support, the pasted-up object interrupts the canvas, the image gains body and weight. It challenges the specific framing of the bidimensional Painting, rigid and inert, lateralized on the wall. Not enough to figurate the world, the paint hurls itself into space. In the war of the living, the impasto incorporates the invisible. Fire melts the bronze; oil paint transmutes the form of the resin made denser with bone ash.

The image projects itself like an apparition. Enchanted ones emerge through the craft and watch over the passage that ties worlds together. In the carnival of souls, Eros and Thanatos interlock in a dance. Passion still burns in the chaos of death. Twilight unveils the enchantery. The Painting makes itself into a Piaga — a guardian of border zones, the mirror for a burning world, in a time outside time.

Chico Soll