M+B is pleased to present Magic Echoes: Brazil Diasporas' Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality a group exhibition featuring work by twelve Brazilian artists: Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Arorá, Chen Kong Fang, Chico da Silva, Gustavo Caboco, Hiram Latorre, Lia D Castro, Lu Ferreira, Lucas Almeida, Luciano Maia, Mateus Moreira, and Thiago Molon. The exhibition opens on Friday, February 21 with an opening reception at the gallery from 6 to 8 pm. Brazil is a country of many. Many origins and traditions, many histories, cultures, and beliefs, many peoples in many lands, coexisting in common spaces of belonging and inequality. The historical materiality narrates a process of supposed conformity of our polyvalent diversity. According to traditional narratives that date back to the colonial period, the various displaced ethnicities and cultures combined uniformly to produce pacified identities, whose differences ‘organically’ unite under a single idea of ‘Brazilianness.’ This process, alienating and oppressive, ignores the genocide suffered by indigenous peoples and their descendants and minimizes the dehumanizing experience imposed on African peoples through enslavement. However, the colonial barbarism enforced by this process in an effort to distance individuals from the memory of their origins and ancestral traditions have always been met with great resistance by the black and indigenous peoples in Brazil. Their cultural and symbolic productions have endured distances and continue to strengthen Brazilian diasporic identities. Other dynamics and transnational movements were introduced into Brazil over the past two centuries. Critical transformations in cultural, social, and economic relations, on both a local and global scale, converged the vectors of new waves of immigration and internal exodus between rural and urban areas, driven by the inequality structure already established through colonization. These phenomena continuously change the forms and spaces where diffuse identities echo, producing collisions that demand new sensibilities. New compromises, capable of alleviating the pressure of unclaimed memories, the drive for unfulfilled desires of belonging, the abstinence of diasporic identities in search of ancestry. If it is in the aesthetic realm where the battle that once focused “on the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillusions of history” now advances, as philosopher Jacques Rancière states, contemporary Brazilian painting presents us with vibrant representations of the mysterious reconciliation between the awe of the image and the relativity of the real. To bring forth memories of complex and painful pasts, it critically engages with the discourse of the diaspora, offering powerful and essential forms of representation that challenge a linear negotiation of identity differences, going beyond already well-known figurative assertions. Through the works of artists from different origins and geographic and racial identities, whose pictorial spaces pulse with a magical resonance of timeless forms, landscapes, and things transformed into strange familiars, the exhibition Magic Echoes: Brazil Diasporas' Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality promotes healing, critical reflection, and the symbolic reimagination of diasporic legacies, seeking to understand the contradictions of the past and the constantly altered differences in the present. In the exhibition, the quartet composed of Chen Kong Fang, Amadeo Lorenzato—representatives of the figurative tradition of modernist vanguards— Lia D Castro and Hiram Latorre—contemporary artists who critically and renewably revisit modernist qualities—presents different approaches to Brazilian painting in representing deep interiorities, in which figures and forms make the voids move and then halt. This group of paintings suggests that the encounter between diasporas and ancestries is not only dialectical but also meditative. Through summarily essential representations and asymmetric compositions that express tense balances, the paintings in this group reflect on the importance of empty spaces in investigating what shapes the reality of the encounter. The meditative treatment is thus revealing of the mysterious aspects of everything considered normal. Paintings by Thiago Molon, Gustavo Caboco, Chico da Silva, and Lu Ferreira also come into dialogue in the exhibition. These artists draw on distinct visual and symbolic repertoires to produce complex abstractions, full of fragments and immanences that do not consolidate the encounters between diaspora and ancestry but rather reinvent their sensibilities. The noisy texture of Thiago Molon’s compositions complements the profusion of colors of Gustavo Caboco, Chico da Silva, and Lu Ferreira. The figurative styles of Molon, Caboco, and da Silva are inseparable from the visual tradition of Brazil’s first diasporic peoples, the indigenous and African peoples, but they cannot be restricted to the continuity of a single tradition. On the other hand, Ferreira’s images allude to emotional processes of fragmentation and reformulation undertaken in the claim of ancestries, but without the pretense of reaching definitive origins or meanings. Mateus Moreira, Lucas Almeida, and Luciano Maia engage with the subjective treatment of essentially universal representations. Similarly to the exhibition group formed by Fang, Lorenzato, D Castro, and Latorre, they focus on imagined interiorities, yet producing more experimental pathways for negotiating identities. Whether in the reinterpretation of myths and folklore, as in Maia’s case, or the mixing of materials and interdisciplinary references, as in Almeida’s, or in the imagistic projection of existential melancholies, as in Moreira’s, these paintings offer relational narratives of healing and empowerment for diverse points of view and identities. As in many American countries, many of Brazil’s diasporas were guided by the moon. Leveled by the sea waves that echo from distant continents, or guided by the night light and stars, the routes of these collective displacements hold a conflicted process of losses and pains, secrets and dreams, passing through generations in search of re-signification. It is no coincidence that the moon, or analogous forms to it, appears in some of the paintings in the exhibition; the moon we see today is the same one faced by our ancestors in their crossings, travels, and escapes. The impulse to encounter diasporic ancestry, one that precedes and is unaware of trauma, is the same as trusting in the magic of the moon to produce the tide that crosses all times and spaces on earth, independent of humanity. Gazing at the shimmering enchantment of the moon makes it possible to weave the entire world and the gazes divided by history and revived in memory, which turn toward it through the longing for what can never be known again. — Gabriela Gotoda