Love will be eternal again

For some reason, whenever I think of Samara’s paintings, the voice of Clara Nunes resonates in my ears. The sun will shine again… echoes directly as this text develops only within me, without a single word yet having been written. Perhaps it’s a beautiful cliché of Brazilian music—emotional and ever-present in sambas, where, at times, we find love, confront emotions, and awaken a collective sense by singing in one voice.

I’m not a great samba singer, and I believe Samara isn’t either, but the nuances lifted by the song—between brightness and tones—can help us understand the color study developed by the artist. There’s a truthfulness we find in her palette, marked by warm tones, like a gentle fire that permeates coziness and creates a safe space, a rhythm to be played.

In Juízo Final, the song I bring as a companion, an image is built around the dichotomy of good and evil, a duality anchored in Christian remnants and reflecting the mix of beliefs present in both Nunes’ work and Brazilian territory. Again, I don’t intend to dwell on the song but to seek pathways through a thorny field, like the one imagined by Maria Firmina dos Reis, a 19th-century Maranhense writer who brought love into her poems, linking romance to struggles.

Conflicts are nearly absent in Samara’s composed images. Rest cradles our eyes as a driving force, accentuating itself like a movie scene where characters cross paths and observe each other unhurriedly, in a blurred setting where only their presence matters, warmed by the light. Giving name and form to one of her paintings, we see The River, or perhaps Rio de Janeiro, as a possible crossing, a space of encounter, a pulse of effervescence.

The people painted by Samara seem to exercise their differences through the simple, the everyday—a right once more claimed by Maria Firmina when she freely wrote about a bouquet of flowers she wished to offer. This reminder of a Black woman who composed texts more than 100 years ago is reflected in this small archive of gestures, to which these faces belong to no time but are like memories that store and blend images from the streets, from photographs, from films, and many others that come to nourish us.

Like a first desire: Love will be eternal again. One can close their eyes here, as when casting a spell in the mind—there’s no room for distractions.

Ariana Nuala