Paulo Nimer Pjota: Encantados

Paulo Nimer Pjota is a Brazilian artist who predominantly works in oil, tempera and acrylic on canvas. His large-scale paintings draw on art history, popular culture, mythology and folk tales, merging multiple references to create new, imaginary scenarios. His approach borrows from the sampling and remixing practices adopted in Brazilian hip-hop and rap music, as well as on his experience as a graffiti artist as a teenager.

The exhibition in the Main Gallery showcases a new series of paintings against an expansive mural painted directly onto the gallery walls. Magical environments are populated by mythical characters, animals and imaginary beasts. The sun, stars and moon are recurring motifs in Pjota’s practice, as are vases, shells and other vessels, often brimming with flowers and plants. The presence of music is also implied, with a three-headed beast in one work playing the trumpet, horn, drum and sax all at the same time.

Bringing together disparate elements from the past, present and an imaginary world,  Pjota introduces us to a new universe where established ideas of value are dismantled and redefined, making way for an alternative future. Unlike a story book in which a clear narrative unfolds, Pjota’s works leave the viewer to make their own sense of his fantastical scenes.

The starting point of Paulo Nimer Pjota’s works is the nature of collectively originated phenomena. Studying iconographies of shared popular and art-historical authorship, the artist draws from the urban culture that nourished his cultural upbringing and awakening to interpret and express new ways of thinking through overlapping forms. In the way hip-hop and other analogous forms of urban culture remix known forms through sampling, Pjota bridges temporalities, clustering, for example, archetypal counter-cultural elements with Greco-Roman and precolonial societies’ aesthetics. Renderings of plants, isolated words, cartoon figures, tattoos, wayward scrawls, accents from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still lifes, and artifacts from pre-Columbian and Hellenic art float in constellations of suspended forms. The resulting dreamlike compositions conjure mythological atmospheres and ritualistic landscapes united by a cyclical weaving together of plural, rapturous dialogues. The artist’s nearly insomniac practice is determined to unearth what – at the other end of the flux of artistic production – remains embedded in memory while at the margins of official history.

By juxtaposing everyday objects with references from the past, he critiques the inefficiency of hierarchical knowledge systems that separate elite and popular culture. Pjota’s compositions reveal a production of images and symbols, produced, remixed, and circulated, often exposing social inequalities in the process. As curator Mateus Nunes remarks, “To remix history is to rebel against the hegemonic and violent cultural system, defending an inevitable contamination of time, history, and image by the confrontation between symbols, spiritualities, and cultural expressions.”

Paulo Nimer Pjota (b. 1988, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo.