A rare and delightful feeling of disorientation springs from looking at an artwork and finding oneself unable to get out of it. This kind of overwhelming absorption rose as I approached Emanoel Araújo’s “Relevo branco” (white relief) (2018). I was apprehended and then gradually pulled in, as if by a kind of torque, each layer of geometric forms ushering me further into a current of receding space. Zigzagging into triangular and hexagonal patterns, valleys of painted white wood overlap with a relentless dynamism, stirring up a visual rhythm that is at once elegant and entropic.
This tendency toward scintillating depth and driving movement is at the core of Araújo’s present exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, a long overdue display of the artist’s work in New York — where it hasn’t been exhibited since the 1980s. Focused on sculpture, the show brings together decades of geometric abstraction with recent wall-based assemblages. The artist and curator was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1940, and grew up steeped in a rich cultural landscape whose aesthetic inheritances included Brazilian goldsmithing and carpentry, Afro-diasporic art and mythology, and Latin American modernism.
Araújo was not only an artist and curator, but also a zealous collector of art and ephemera from Africa and its diaspora. These practices were indispensable to one another: He approached collecting as a form of creating. As the artist himself has remarked, his work might be seen as a departure from the primarily figurative vocabularies predominant in his collection. But lingering with Araújo’s work, viewers may sense a prolonged and profound engagement with the art he collected, the generative flow of geometry, energy, and tension that touched him in his study of West African and diasporic art.
Many of Araújo’s early geometric abstractions on view here might be called minimalist constructions, with their economy of form and limited color palette. Instead, I am compelled to think of these works as architectonic portals, invitations to dwell and imagine worlds from within their layers. Take for example “Sem Titulo” (1986), a freestanding sculpture in which two columns of crisscrossing, layered triangles stretch up and then coalesce with a third, forming something like a post and lintel gate. Elsewhere, “Untitled” (1986) plays upon the world-making effects of painting: Set inside a frame, a three-dimensional sculpture is punctuated by two blocks of negative space, constructing layers of physical depth in lieu of the illusory depth of pictorial representation.
This co-dependency between making and collecting is particularly visible in works from the past decade, totem-like assemblages where the influence of African aesthetics on Araújo’s artistic language is explicit. In works like “Anastasia” (2021) and “Escothila” (2021), African masks and figurines adorn or nest within wooden panels decorated with the elaborate geometric patterning of earlier works. A trio of sculptures collectively titled Navio (2021) are pierced with nails, calling to mind Congolese power figures or Nkisi, which accumulated nails and blades during cleansing ritual practices.
Ultimately, the rhythmic power of Araújo’s work speaks for itself. But it also speaks to his vital legacy both in Brazil — where he has long been recognized as an essential artist — and elsewhere in the African diaspora. This exhibition is coterminous with a retrospective at the Museu Afro Brazil, which was founded by the artist himself. It opened just five days after the 35th Sao Paolo Bienal, the first to be curated by a majority Black team. Araújo spent his life fighting tirelessly for Black art and artists. The aforementioned events signal clearly that it is time we give him his due credit as a world maker, both in art and in life.
Emanoel Araújo continues at Jack Shainman Gallery (513 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 28. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
