Antonio Obá’s “Rituals of Care”

In September 2019, an eight-year-old girl named Ágatha Vitória Sales Félix was shot and killed by police in Rio de Janeiro as she was riding home in a small public bus with her mother. The officers argued that they had been fired upon first, and moreover, that they were in the midst of a wider war, part of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s “30 bullets for every bandit” crackdown on crime, during which nearly a third of all violent deaths in Brazil’s second largest city came at the hands of the state.1 Witnesses countered that there had been no such shots, and rather, that the officers, unprovoked, had targeted an unarmed motorcyclist, and missed. Ágatha Félix was shot in the back and rushed to a local hospital, where she died. Reportedly, police then raided the hospital to try and retrieve the stray bullet that had killed her, lest it be used as evidence against them, but were unsuccessful.2 Within days, protests erupted across the favelas of Rio, where Ágatha was born and raised.

That same year, the artist Antonio Obá painted a harrowing group portrait of thirteen small boys crowded together behind a table piled high with loaves of bread. The central figure, dressed in white, clutches a framed portrait of a haloed head. It could be Saint Anthony of Carthage (Santo Antonio de Categeró), Obá’s namesake and a patron of the poor, who appears often in the rich, syncretic iconography that is characteristic of the artist’s work. But more likely, it is Ágatha. Metaphorically speaking, the thirteen boys are her brothers. The painting, titled Réquiem (2019), is Obá’s act of honoring her life while at the same time raging against her death, and then slipping in the suggestion that society at large has betrayed this Last-Supper-like grouping of pre-adolescent boys. Deep-red walls, flatly painted and creased in gold, seem to be folding in around them. A tablecloth with dainty blue patterns hangs over but does not hide their tender feet. Each boy’s face is half-filled with vampire teeth, shockingly white, dramatically filed to sharp points, and set against blood-red gums. Their expressions convey a heavy inheritance made all the more burdensome by the lived experience of hunger, fury, and defiance.

Réquiem is one in a series of remarkable pieces anchoring Obá’s “Rituals of Care,” his first solo museum show in Europe, curated by Andrea Bellini and sprawled across two floors of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. Visitors enter the exhibition through a field of tiny brass bells, each hooked onto a metal stake that has been plunged into of one of two white concrete blocks on either side of a suggested path. With this iteration of the installation Jardim (2022), Obá entices you to tread that path, at varying speeds, while running your fingers through the bells. The result is an unholy racket that is both thrilling and cathartic, given Obá’s demonstrated commitment to transubstantiating some of the more devastating facts of human history—colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, religious warfare, and the persistence of twenty-first-century racism—into strange and hauntingly beautiful artworks.

Obá was born and raised in the agricultural suburbs of Brasilia. He is now 41, lives with his mother, and teaches drawing to students in public schools, the same kind of technical drawing—promising liberation through repetition and mastery—that, alongside Angolan capoeira, first turned him into an artist twenty years ago. His given name is a nod to one of Catholicism’s few black saints. His family name was chosen relatively late in life to celebrate his Afro-Brazilian origins (until then he was called Antonio de Paulo). Obá, meaning “king” in Yoruba, refers to an orisha, or divine spirit, governing rivers and thunder and the duality of masculine and feminine attributes, in the religious and spiritual traditions carried over to Latin America and the Caribbean via the slave trade from Central and West Africa.

Those traditions course throughout the current exhibition, which includes more than two dozen paintings, three large-scale installations, a few sculptures, and a roomful of drawings made directly on the walls. Some of the installations are over the top. Among them is Malungo - rito para uma missa preta (2016), featuring an altar on a wooden plank, bottles of cachaça, an abundance of gold leaf, and three low troughs filled with bits of charcoal and ex-votos in the shape of saints, orishas, and other spiritual figures. Others are less maximalist and more promising. In Encantado (2024), documentation of a performance—showing the artist lurching through a forest as he struggles to free himself from a rope-like tunic—is projected onto a huge screen, alone in a room scattered with crunching leaves and the smell of earth. The bronze sculpture Obra em negro (Work in black), from 2022, with a dozen shapes strung from the ceiling and vaguely reminiscent of spiked seedpods, provides further evidence of Obá’s strength as a formalist.

The paintings, meanwhile, move purposefully through portraiture, landscape, historical drama, a glimpse of modernist décor (in Trampolim - banhista, 2019), and the three graces as allegories of life, death, and courage. The orisha known as the trickster Eshu stands in the center of Obá’s magisterial Stranger Fruits - genealogia (2020), a painting named for (and to my eye as powerful as) Billie Holiday’s version of “Strange Fruit,” a pain-filled, disturbingly alluring song about lynching, which Angela Davis memorably described as having “put the elements of protest and resistance back at the center of contemporary black musical culture.”3 Marked by his vivid red shorts, Eshu lingers in a field behind a resplendent flowering tree. A swing hangs from one of the branches, alongside a lit candle. Two figures—a boy and an older woman standing in for Obá’s grandmother—have lodged themselves among other branches. It appears to be night, the sky a garish green, except that the tree and swing are casting strange shadows, turning the painting inside out such that sky becomes wall, the field of wheat a stage set.

Similarly, in Angelus (2022), a man sleeps with his head against another tree. There is an ancestral spirit behind him, an eruption of angels above, and what could well be a burning bush to his side. Seven figures, including five small children, appear to have been shot into the air by the flames of white-hot fire below, except that their bodies, too, are casting shadows against an ostensible purple sky. Obá’s paintings, palpably the strongest part of his multidisciplinary practice, combine the architectural riddles of Remedios Varo with the narrative sophistication of Kerry James Marshall, where every portion of a given painting tells a story all at once. Obá populates his paintings with ghosts, terrifying birds, and so many emotive trees. Those trees offer camouflage and refuge. Sometimes their branches recall photographic emulsion, which speaks to the artist’s playfulness with technique. Other times they symbolize death, civilizational rot, and decay. In each composition, Obá carefully, cleverly positions his audience, most notably in Banhistas no. 3 - Espreita (2020), in which a crocodile jauntily pokes its head from the gestural ripples of an aquamarine swimming pool. (Just as Obá’s Réquiem responds to the death of Ágatha Félix, Banhistas no. 3 - Espreita recalls the Monson Motor Lodge protest of 1964, when the owner of a Florida motel threw acid at a group of civil rights activists who had hopped into his pool for the purpose of desegregating it.) Two young men are languidly treading water, their eyes reptilian above the surface. Another avatar of Eshu, streaked in red, is lurking behind another tree. Obá places us, as viewers, on the back end of a diving board that juts out from the lower right edge of the painting, as if to taunt us, saying “jump right in.”