The Garden

O Jardim – Efrain Almeida

The monographic exhibition O Jardim (The Garden) presents a cross-section of different periods in the production of the artist from Ceará, Efrain Almeida. Developed especially for the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), the exhibition has nature as its center and highlights nuclei that activate the dimensions of the sacred, daily routine, and life, using the metaphor of the garden – a territory of memories and affections originating from the artist's parents' home, at Sítio Olho d'Água dos Facundos, in the city of Boa Viagem, in the backlands of Ceará. The set presented also comprises the transition that is established in the artist's sculptural projects, from wood production to bronze, in addition to including other techniques he worked on, such as painting, embroidery, and drawing.

The exhibition continues the research that began in 2020 and unfolds in the documentary “Ensaio para outros Instantes” (“Rehearsal for other Instants”) (2021) and the exhibition Encarnado (Incarnate) (2023), presented at Cariri Cultural Center in Crato (CE). Both works discuss the body, the sacred, and the territory, starting from Canindé and Juazeiro do Norte, important religious centers in that state.

In this new moment, O Jardim focuses on the biographical gesture that announces itself through intimate fauna and flora of a body-nature, in which different cycles compose the relationships established between survival and existence, between life and death, between camouflage and mimicry. Cardinals, hummingbirds, moths, and campo troupial materialize displacements, transits, flows, and the desire for survival in other landscapes, processes of a bird-body that are related to the lives of so many migratory bodies throughout Brazil. These are natural actions and processes that are organized with the sole aim of establishing a way of existing and coexisting.

A place for the articulation of an intricate biological plot – where the system of habits and repetitions coexist in a game of exchanges, agreements, and dialogues –, Efrain Almeida's garden combines the biographical dimension with the relationships between life and art that are so fertile in the artist's poetic territory. Here, the simplest places are potential spaces for the great transformations that we see in nature all the time, where everything is renewed, reinvented, reproduced, and regenerated.

Bitu Cassundé

Curator

By holding this unprecedented exhibition by Brazilian artist Efrain Almeida, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum brings a garden into the exhibition room. Here, there will certainly be a silent exchange between artist and visitor.

With his birds, houses, nests, trees, and various other animals, Efrain connects us to nature, which can serve as an antidote to oblivion and contemporary ephemera. Sculptures, installations, paintings, and embroidery evoke simple scenes that bring us into contact with our essence.

Each work gains its meaning from the viewer's singular gaze, confirming the most genuine vocation of artistic creation: to provoke reflection. 

His intimate, symbolic work is always sensitive. Attentive, he turns banal images into disturbing art. Unusually, he demonstrates in his work what often escapes our hurried glances. 

MON’s purpose is to raise people’s awareness of art. By offering multiple experiences, such as the presentation of this artist's interesting work, it provides the viewer with a more plural interpretation of themselves and the world. 

In a happy coincidence, the “O Jardim” (“The Garden”) exhibition takes place simultaneously with the installation of the “MON sem Paredes” (“MON without Walls”) project, in which the Museum breaks its physical limits. With an interactive sculpture park in the outdoor area, MON embraces the public and invites them to enter.

The largest art museum in Latin America, with 35 thousand square meters of built area, the MON building is the result of a bold proposal designed by Master Niemeyer. 

Transformed into a museum, what would otherwise be just a building, it is a living space inhabited by art. And, so that its content never falls short of the beauty of the building, which is immense, it is always necessary to delight the public. That is the role of exhibitions like this. 

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika

Director-president of Oscar Niemeyer Museum

I had a lot of conflicts with my father over issues of belief. Not religious beliefs, but beliefs about things in life. I didn't talk to him for many years, and my work reconnected me with my father. At the time he returned to live in the backlands (Sítio Olho d’Água, in Boa Viagem – CE), I started traveling there frequently and started working on projects that I was willing and interested in. Living in his workshop environment was decisive for the work I do, especially in sculpture. I remember the smell of wood, recognizing wood by its smell, and the specific tools for each type of work.

Then he started helping me with the possible parts of the job. I drew and made the silhouette, and he cut it on a band saw. Then I made the sculpture itself. This manufacturing brings the knowledge of the hand – even the way of holding the piece – and the heat that the hand transfers to the materials you work with. This hand can bring back a kind of ancestral memory. All of this, for me, has a relationship of ancestry and the transmission of knowledge through this type of slow and silent ritual that is manual work. Much of the communication that I begin to establish with my father is a silent kind of exchange.

I also remember a moment when, because of my work, people started to order ex-votos for my father. And then I asked him “how did you manage to make the ex-votos”? He replied: “I learned how to make ex-votos by watching you make your sculptures.” It's very interesting how this story creates a kind of circularity – the ex-voto that my father makes after seeing me working.

Efrain Almeida in an interview with Bitu Cassundé, April 2023.

I work on a small scale – the sculptures are hand-sized. It is as if these works were confessional, a whisper. The work would be much more about something silent than actually a scream, in the sense of being spectacular. It's a small event that will reveal great things to you.

There is a simplified idea of saying that it is a work about the backlands. It's not a work that talks about the backlands: it's a work that talks about my experience in the backlands, my childhood experience, and my experiences as an artist in the world. So, it's much more about this place that I belong to – and about its complexities – than in the sense of representation.

For example, the presence of the hummingbird, a bird that I use frequently, has to do with the experience of being in my parents' garden and having the presence of these birds. It also has to do with knowing that hummingbirds have a spiritual relationship with the representation of the rainbow, water, and the spirit of the forest. It's not about the image, the bird, or nature, but about all the surrounding senses.

So, I always think about these possible connections with the place, with nature, with the idea of belonging, the body as a shelter, or the place that receives this information, and that puts me in touch with these moments, which, for me, are very dear and important, in the sense of realizing that it is something bigger, that it is a vibration, that it is a connection with my history. 

Efrain Almeida in an interview with Bitu Cassundé, April 2023.

I increasingly believe in the ideas that some scholars defend about ancestral knowledge through dreams, which is that it is through dreams that you connect with your ancestry. I also believe that ancestry and knowledge are given through work and crafts. Manual work and craftsmanship bring a lot to this character of the ancestry. It brings with it the knowledge that is passed from hand to hand. And this hand can bring back a kind of ancestral memory that is passed from generation to generation. That's what reconnects me with my history and with my place of belonging.

I only became aware of this type of production through miracle houses, at religious festivals, mainly in Canindé, which was where my family went for the feast of Saint Francis. So I understand the room of miracles as this place of a kind of religious trance, but also the trance that the work of art itself causes. When you're in front of a work and you don't even know exactly what's happening there, there's something about that exchange, in the presence of that object, that transforms you in some way.

It's this purest sense of art, of transformation, of taking you from one place and putting you in another, of a kind of displacement. It's a key that will take you out of one place and put you in another. Furthermore, it will put you in a different tune. So, it happened to me in the miracle room, and I think it's beautiful to think about these ideas because it's a miracle, it's religion, it's transformation, but it changed me as a person, maybe as an artist. 

Efrain Almeida in an interview with Bitu Cassundé, April 2023.