The young painter experienced, by means of the collections exposed in the antique shop belonging to his grandfather Sir Nóbrega, and later to his father Claudino Nóbrega, also a painter, the cohabitation with the Brazilian sacred art.
The rich iconography of the saints in the devotions of the Brazilian catholic religion. The sculptures of images of saints bequeathed the Brazilian culture with a memorable artistic production from the seventeenth century up until today. Erudite and popular, this imagery was found in religious temples and in the oratories of many Brazilian homes, of the wealthy as well the poor. It is certain that the sculpting of saints and the painting of altars and ceilings gave fame to great artists of the Baroque and Rococo periods in Bahia, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro.
This short introduction serves as the beginning of an essay about the works of Gustavo Nóbrega, a painter and installer. His recent production, currently shown in this exhibition, expands, amplifies itself and takes hold of this rich religious imagery of saints, seeking a plastic approach, intersections between the profane and the sacred, a halo of sensations and of miraculous reverberations such as votive works, contemporary ex-votos. A miracle sketcher, a metaphoric sketcher, who subtracts from the miracle its principal objective, that of praying and of registering the fact of vowing, of a promise. Why deny the reciprocity between man and the Divine? There resides the new proposal of eliminating the supernatural entity, to which we resort to in our moments of desperation. In turn, he proposes a science structured by formulas without illusions, without the mystique of happening, of the sometimes logic actions of this puzzle, this assembling game full of bodily provocations that save the soul through the miracle of medicine.
If previously those archaic works from the religious imaginary set out to evoke and attribute themselves to the supernatural and to salvation, Gustavo, in his work, denies this encounter between man, his corporal action and the entity in virtue of the graces attained.
And so, the Deification here exists between the sacred and the profane which are the causes transmitted by the printed medicine usage directions to the various curing processes. There lies in these works, however, a plastic perception, a current posture of the representation of the painting’s theme properly mentioned with its nuances and its results of attraction and of attribution, with the color, the magic, with the composition, with the intention to communicate an idea.
To idealize a new proposition, of disturbance, and there resides the artwork in the moment of materializing itself with the involvement of symbolic language, enough to achieve perception of the constructive elements as abstract plastic values.
Emanoel Araújo