Povoada

The Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo Museum is delighted to host the exhibition “Povoada” by the artist Diego Mouro as part of its Black Awareness Month program. This show is a wonderful opportunity for the public to view recent works by an artist with whom the institution has been engaged in a rich dialog for nearly three years.

This relationship began in December 2020, when the Museum’s founder and then Curator and Executive Director, Emanoel Araujo (1940-2022), invited Diego Mouro to create, with five other artists, the large mural “Foram os homens e as mulheres negras que construíram a identidade nacional. Vidas negras do Brasil” [It Was the Black Men and Women Who Have Built the National Identity. Black Lives in Brazil]. The activist exhibition took up the entire external façade of the Padre Manoel da Nóbrega Pavilion, the Museum’s headquarters, highlighting and denouncing the racism and violence that primarily affects the black population in our country while positively reaffirming the contributions of this population to the formation of Brazilian society. Visitors to the Park can still see the murals produced.

The dialogue with the artist continued shortly afterward, in 2021, when Araujo nominated Mouro to illustrate the Commemorative Stamp for the 150th anniversary of the Law of the Free Womb, a Post Office project carried out in partnership with the Museum. The work created by the artist, which we now have the privilege of seeing in this exhibition, was launched in stamp format in October of that same year and presented for the first time at the Museum the following December.

A few months later, Araujo shared his desire to hold a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the institution. The curator passed away before making this show a reality. Still, beforehand, he had already welcomed Mouro’s idea to submit the project of “Povoada” to the ProAC Call for Proposals, so that it could be held at the Museum. It was with great enthusiasm that the Museum’s team received the news that the project had been awarded a prize in this edict shortly afterward.

Therefore, the exhibition “Povoada” is the fruit of an almost three-year relationship between Diego Mouro and the Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo Museum. It brings together a body of work that demonstrates, once again, the strength of a production that, year after year, mobilizes and moves the public, reiterating the artist’s mastery of portraying the subtle details of everyday life, as well as the permanence and transmission of practices and pieces of knowledge through relationships and affections.

May new paths continue to open up for this talented artist! May long-lasting and fruitful partnerships be renewed and strengthened along the way!

Thirty-five years ago, the exhibition “A Mão Afro-Brasileira – Significado da contribuição artística e histórica” [The Afro-Brazilian Hand–Significance of the Artistic and Historical Contribution] was held. The show was part of the events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the end of slavery in Brazil. The exhibition was organized by the Bahian artist and curator Emanoel Araujo and took place in the rooms of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. In the same year, Araujo, a remarkable polymath, also edited the book “Pintores Negros do Oitocentos” [Black Painters from the 19th Century], by José Roberto Teixeira Leite. At a significant moment in our history, these anthological events brought to light an essential part of a historically neglected artistic and intellectual production. In their high degree of novelty, both events also exposed the structural racism faced by exhibitions and publications.

Through Diego Mouro’s substantial work, we see the confirmation of an Afro-diasporic tradition of high-quality art-making and painting that dates back to the Colonial period and has exponents of great importance at all times and movements in Brazilian art history. Therefore, it is of great significance that, 35 years after that historic exhibition, the Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo Museum welcomes the recent achievements of this still young artist in one of its galleries.

Mouro’s firm painting suggests he is genuinely committed to this artistic medium and uses the resources at his disposal with ease. Diego Mouro makes the most of oil paint’s many qualities, enhancing its materiality, for example. In his paintings, color is gradually built up on the surface of the canvas, and the signs of this process are incorporated into the narrative that makes the images. As a result, vibrancy adds rhythm, movement, and tension to the plot presented and brings even greater interest to the subject matter.

There is a certain solemnity, a certain monumentality, gravity, and even grandeur in this painting, regardless of the size of each artwork. These impressions, rather than being immediately associated with the subjects the artist explores in his portraits, landscapes, or still lifes, are accentuated by the elaborated treatment Diego Mouro lends to such themes, which come from his affection and memory as well as from the collective and ancestral affections and memories.

In fact, his sensitively balanced compositions are highlighted by a sober palette, sometimes warm and earthy, sometimes bluish cold, greenish and grayish, but never anodyne or innocuous.

Last but not least, the exhibition “Povoada” also celebrates Diego Mouro’s work as a muralist, and everything evoked in this survey reveals a significant amount of time the artist devoted to research, which, combined with his sharp poetic sense, ensures the interest and quality of the seductive images that, generously offered to the audience, capture our attention.

People, 2023

oil on canvas
100x160 cm

I think the waters initiate the Birds, 2023

oil on canvas
30x24 cm

An altar for Candeal, 2023

oil on canvas
90x120 cm

Crossing, 2023

oil on canvas
30x40 cm

About. , 2022

oil on canvas
30x30 cm

Refugee, 2021

oil on canvas
60x80 cm

Warble, 2023

oil on canvas 
60x50 cm

Darkening lights up the fireflies, 2023

oil on canvas
90x120 cm

Man of the waters, 2022

oil on canvas
40x50 cm