Making visible the invisible: the relentless pursuit of Éder Oliveira
The painter from Pará is the artist who, from December, will inspire the visual identity of Concertação’s digital channels
A hardened, joyless or constrained gaze, withered physique and unrevealed identity. Seen by society as outcasts, these are the individuals featured in Éder Oliveira’s paintings. Using the crime pages of newspapers as raw material, the painter gives identity to the anonymous characters who are seen as criminals, even if not found guilty of any wrongdoing.
Photography has always been present in his work, but he is not the one to take the photos. In his creative process, Éder appropriates photos published in crime pages, replacing the setting with an aesthetic and artistic context that goes far beyond the idea of criminality.
The artist uses a variety of techniques, ranging from oil on canvas to large urban interventions to which he has dedicated much of his career. He also uses watercolors, site-specifics Site-specific is a term that refers to works of art created for a specific location, so that they are closely linked to the environment in which they are found. and objects that take photography as basis. In an interview to the Concertation, he described his artistic process:
“For about ten years, I appropriated photojournalism from the crime pages. (…) I used to take the photos out of context, cut out what I found interesting and presented the outcome as a work of art, which automatically subverted the image of the outcasts, turning it into something beautiful. From there, the audience realized that they were looking at young, beautiful and strong people.”
Moving from a small town into the capital city gave rise to his desire to portray ordinary people in his paintings, and made him see that he was one of them
Éder Oliveira was born in the village of Velha Timboteua, municipality of Nova Timboteua, a small town in Pará, about 140 km from Belém. He left in 2004, at the age of 17, to attend Art Education school in the capital city. He expected to experience a city different from the one that he did and realized that the customs in Timboteua were very similar to those on the outskirts of the city: “we talked, dressed and had haircuts like they did on the outskirts of Belém”.
But in college, he perceived that his classmates and professors did not listen to the same music as he, they did not talk or dress like him, nor did they bear the same connection with the forest and the river. This strange version of the city gave rise to his desire to portray “ordinary” people, rather than the “elite” of higher education. Only later on did he understand that his desire was truly to portray people like himself.
The violence of the exclusion of the poorest bursts in red hues and storms into all landscapes
At the time, becoming aware of his color blindness led him to explore monochromatic tones; red, in particular, a color that also highlights the violence of exclusion of the most vulnerable young people. With no funds to hire live models as he wished, he began to research images printed in magazines and newspapers. Then he realized that these were racialized people who had their lives marked by fleeing, appropriation of forests and who only had the chance to appear in the newspapers if on the crime pages.
Since then, Éder Oliveira’s artistic trajectory has focused on redefining the identity of these people who bear black and indigenous traits. His works depict the perverse mechanisms of social exclusion that mark the lives of poor young people and trivialize their identities. They also emphasize the relationships between image, skin color and marginalization, as shown in the following canvas, of Páginas Vermelhas series (Photo: Felipe Berndt):
To resignify is to take the photos back to the newspapers, now in the most noble editorials
Oliveira highlights the production and circulation of photographs of individuals considered criminals a priori, while seeking new contexts and alternative scenarios for these images. Taken from crime pages, the photos are transformed into paintings, murals and urban interventions that create other possibilities, displaying beauty where most people could only see beast. If they return to the newspapers, the individuals depicted will do so as an integral part of works of art, published in culture sections.
Another aspect of his work that deserves to be mentioned is his pursuit to scale up. This is an effort that responds to the need to create a more significant visual impact and which led him to become interested in urban interventions. At first, they filled smaller walls. As he acquired more autonomy and resources, the artist began to produce larger works, hiring scaffolding and assistants to structure these interventions in larger spaces.
Éder reports that he has been reformulating this approach for the last 10 years, and gradually replacing individual portraits with scenes that provide a context for his characters. These are new approaches and forms of artistic expression that seek to address ethical issues related to the representation of specific faces, especially in the context of images appropriated from newspapers.
This transformation is also the result of reflection on the possibility of painting other Amazons besides his own, which is characteristically urban. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist has delved deeper into the travel literature produced by explorers from the colonial period, who always took illustrators on their excursions and brought a foreign perspective to the Amazon. This immersion also made him feel more comfortable portraying other Amazons.
Although these works carry the same evidence of the marginalization of the most vulnerable people, they now emphasize scenes and narratives rather than individual faces. This shift broadens the focus of his work, such that violence and social exclusion are displayed by means of urban and riverside landscapes. For him, it is the evolution of his original concept, which maintains the connection with his reflections on the Amazon, the outskirts and the social complexities of the region.
There are many Amazons
The artist shared with the Concertation the idea that there are different Amazons. In support of this idea, he recalls a boat ride he took from Belém to Iquitos, in Peru, where he noticed that the traits of the inhabitants on each part of the journey were very different. To the point that he lost the image that he had of himself as belonging to the “ordinary” people, as he advanced further into the territory.
“That was when I realized the dimensions of the Amazon. For instance, from Manaus onwards, there is a Peruvian Amazon inside the Brazilian Amazon, to a point in which even people’s countenance is different. From that point on, I could no longer feel like I was a part of that, I felt like a foreigner.”
Éder also reported on the existence of major differences between rural and urban Amazon, the different weather that predominates in the state capitals of the area, the different colors of the land seen on the banks of the rivers and many other elements that he has portrayed in his most recent works.
The predominance of the color red is a way of maintaining the critical essence of his work
Despite the change in focus and the depicting of the differences between the many Amazons, the intense use of red remains and unifies his work. This color allows him to maintain the debate about the marginalization of the most vulnerable in the region.
“Almost every time I paint this river, I paint it red, because of all the blood and violence in the Amazon, and my work involves violence. I don’t want to portray this landscape because it’s beautiful. I am addressing a difficult and complicated subject, and it needs to be looked at”.
