Rafael Pereira
The trial by fire for the young visual artist Rafael Pereira came in 2023, with his first solo exhibition with us at Galeria Estação. He passed this challenge brilliantly. The exhibition attracted many visitors and captivated numerous collectors who now own works by the artist.
Between 2023 and 2026, Rafael’s painting has matured and gained increasing recognition. In 2025, he took part in an art residency program at Sertão Negro, an initiative created by Dalton Paula and Ceiça Ferreira in Goiânia, Brazil. During this experience, the artist lived and worked alongside other young artists, benefiting from an exchange that is clearly reflected in the richness of his recent production.
A self-taught artist, Rafael had the privilege of growing up in the home of the collector Torquato Pessoa, owner of an important art library. This environment greatly supported his development, and over the years, he chose to dedicate himself fully to painting. With a critical text by historian Renato Menezes, we now present his new works.
Vilma Eid
Rafael Pereira: The Head of Zumbi
Refazendo tudo
Refazenda
Refazenda toda
Guariroba
Gilberto Gil. "Refazenda", 1975
From the standpoint of his formal choices, Rafael Pereira’s artistic production offers a constant homage to the aesthetic experience of the modern avant-gardes. From a heuristic perspective, however, his work reflects a tireless commitment to correcting and recalibrating, whenever necessary, certain historical distortions produced by the very modernity to which it turns. It is within this difficult reconciliation, achieved through a disciplined chromatic intelligence and a refined sense of composition that the core of his recent work is to be found.
The word “distortion,” used here, is no more than a generous euphemism for a series of colonial initiatives which, driven by financial and technological advantage, subjected African cultures to sweeping generalizations, leaving the continent’s population and its diaspora with countless historical voids. In short, it was necessary to steal their history to cynically claim that there was no history at all. A paradigmatic example of this process is what occurred with the so-called Head of Ife, a masterpiece of Yoruba sculpture, probably an oni (king) represented as the incarnation of Oduduwa, the supreme deity unearthed in 1938 in the city of Ife, one of the kingdoms of the former Oyo Empire, in what is now southwestern Nigeria. It belongs to a group of eighteen objects cast in a bronze-and-brass alloy, produced around the twelfth century. The beginnings of its history therefore precede that tragic sequence of events that led to its seizure in 1939, when it became part of the collection of the British Museum in London; its discovery and its fate, however, are genuinely modern facts, insofar as they bear witness to the way in which modernity, so obsessed with ideas of progress and territorial expansion subjected the history of Africa and its descendants to its own criteria of judgment.
A decade earlier, when the German archaeologist Leo Frobenius discovered terracotta sculptures during excavations in the same region, he believed he was confronting evidence of a Greek presence in Africa, thus lending a degree of plausibility to the myth of Atlantis, the sunken island in the Atlantic Ocean mentioned by Plato. According to Frobenius, sculptures of that kind, executed using the lost-wax technique and marked by an extraordinary realism of sober, serene expression, whose features seemed to conform to the codes of classical portraiture could not have been produced by the local population. Betrayed by his own stereotypes, he rejected the possibility that African art had ever engaged in the imitation of nature, as though this were a privilege reserved for European art. This episode stands as a portrait of the way in which modernity, even as it claimed to have “rediscovered” African art, questioned, when it did not outright nullify its intelligence.
Rafael Pereira’s painting constitutes a sustained exercise in reconstructing a memory that has been systematically erased, plundered, and concealed. At the heart of this exercise operates a counter colonial tactic for which the concept of “involvement,” developed by Antônio Bispo dos Santos, ¹ is particularly apt. It is a strategy aimed at dismantling the principle of “development”, the vector of progress and evolution that underpinned colonial practices. Whereas “development” has always been grounded in objectivity and reason, the twin pillars of the myth of neutrality and impartiality, “involvement,” by contrast, is linked to subjectivity and imagination, both of which were stripped from African and diasporic Black life.
To restore “involvement” to Blackness ultimately means replacing the necropolitical structure to which it was consigned with the periodic renewal of a pact with life, with nature, and with a decelerated experience of time. To involve means to de-hierarchize the various forms of life and to strengthen the networked connection among beings. This choice in favor of life, made explicit in the artist’s work through his predilection for portraiture, a genre that radically affirms contemplation and negates objectifying labor takes on yet another dimension in light of the artist’s decision to live in small, scarcely or not at all cosmopolitan cities, with limited populations, where relationships are established without the mediation of technological apparatuses, but rather through face-to-face encounter, attentive listening, and direct observation. Turning toward the interior thus comes to signify, simultaneously, a traversal of the geography of Brazil’s less urbanized cities in a constant search for the refuge necessary for creation, and a journey through the subjective space of one’s own body and consciousness in a constant search for the self when reunion with oneself coincides with reunion with one’s own history.
For centuries, the West believed physiognomy to be an effective means of unveiling a subject’s character traits, which is why portraiture became a strategy of political affirmation. The power of invoking the subject through painting led Leon Battista Alberti, Italian architect, humanist, and art theorist to write in his Treatise that “painting is a way of making the absent present,” a genuinely representational device (that is, of presenting again) through a new economy of the visible. At first glance, Rafael Pereira’s work appears to result directly from the assimilation of these codes of traditional portraiture in order, from them, to imagine futures, reconstruct histories, and invent identities, thereby surpassing the ways in which Black life has been evaluated. This is what we see, for example, in the Portrait of Beatriz Nascimento, who herself devoted her work to providing the tools to retrace the history of Brazil’s Black population.
At the same time, the artist creates faces drawn from his imagination, as part of an exercise in settling accounts with history and accessing a dimension of memory neutralized by trauma: intuition is an ancestral technology. In this way, through his colors and textures, he brings back into existence the living presence of people traversed by affects, thoughts, and silent desires. It is here that the codes of portraiture are subverted. What, for Europeans, appeared solely as visages, that is, as the emanation of personality through the face reveals itself, in Pereira’s painting, as a link to the divine: the head, orí for the Yoruba and mutuê for the Bantu. It is in the head that an individual’s vital force resides; there lies the connection to the nkisi, the ancestral energy and individual destiny that each person carries from birth, a connection reinforced by the strand of beads, another recurring sign in his work.
The theme of the ancestral head structures the Nbimda series, composed of sixteen paintings of varying dimensions, each representing a divinity (nkisi) worshipped in Angolan Candomblé of Bantu origin. Each divinity is identified by its attributes: the white flag belongs to Kintembu, the Great Wind, nkisi of time; the bow and arrow belong to Kabila, who governs hunting and abundance; the double-bladed axe identifies Nzazi, lord of thunder, lightning, and justice, the embodiment of strength, leadership, and authority; Nkaitumba, in turn, appears associated with fish, symbols of both her dwelling place, the sea, and its principal attribute, intelligence. Each head asserts itself on the canvas as an effigy or monument, definitively renouncing face and character traits. What is at stake here is that which transcends the linear time of humanity in order to access the divine.
The texture, formed by modulated brushstrokes that produce an effect akin to roughly carved wood or terracotta interacts with the construction of sandy landscapes in muted tones and with an abstract tendency. These landscapes, which have neither defined time nor place, return us to the landscapes of imagined portraits, recognizing them as a visual resource for reinforcing history. On the one hand, the history of art, whether through evocations of masters of modern art such as Ione Saldanha, José Pancetti, Lasar Segall, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, and Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt, or through traditional African textile art, as in the background of the painting entitled Kuba, which evokes the cultural group of the Congo Basin whose women produce such textiles from multicolored raffia fibers through a complex dynamic of improvisation. On the other hand, this atemporal landscape reinforces a collective history of resistance through the mutuê, capable of traversing centuries without having its force eroded.
This is what Alberto Mussa suggests in his short story “The Head of Zumbi”:
Finally, Pernambuco was able to witness the spectacle for which it had waited so long: impaled on a crude pike, Zumbi’s head was displayed in Recife, in a public square.
But not for long. For Zumbi, an eternal mortal, having reached the apex of his ideal, had dissolved his own individuality, disseminating himself as a collective being. None of God’s children dared such greatness.
Thus, from time to time, Pernambuco continued to see Zumbi’s face,
even in women; even in children; even in whites.
Hence the anguish of those who come to the outskirts of Palmares or simply contemplate the Serra da Barriga: for hidden in those forests lies a possible negation of the singularity of beings and of human ontology itself; for, wandering through the thickets, there is certainly still some Zumbi left to die. ²
In Rafael Pereira’s painting, each individual is, potentially, a reborn, reinvented, remade Zumbi.
Renato Menezes
Art historian
Notes
