Freedom, Independence, and Emancipation

There is a subtlety, almost a secret, among Black people. Especially among us Black women. When we are the only ones in certain spaces and our eyes meet, we smile at each other. I don't know if it happens in every encounter, in every situation, but it is something I experience frequently. Sometimes this complicity comes as a smile, but it also presents itself with other silent expressions of tenderness and recognition.

The reddish tones and desaturated colors of Samara Paiva's painting evoke an atmosphere of identification and a relationship of care with the observer. Each canvas, even the less figurative ones, reveals itself gradually, with calm and delicate gestures. The gaze travels across the pictorial surface with the lightness of a secret exchange of glances. We notice where the paint and brush have traveled, forming paths, textures, skin, fabric, and time. A different time, where slow music plays, where there is no rush from one task to another, where existing and being present, breathing and feeling, is more important than the hours of the day. The time is one of freedom.

Thus, painting is not merely a checklist to be completed, a discovery born of chance where colors come together randomly or to the rhythm of a market system. Painting is a political action, happening in a way that gives shape and visibility to issues of faith, beauty, desire, invention, and the exorcism of ancient-present ways of visuality. June Jordan writes about how poetry means taking control of the language of one's own life. In these terms, painting like Samara Paiva's is a reclamation and recreation of the language that describes our lives, their small details, or what they could be. A good portrait, like a good poem, can be recognized as a gesture of care, lightness, and affection. The more everyday, the more ordinary and simple the task, like washing your face upon waking, the more beautifully this pictorial, almost abstract gesture, rescues the vision of a life of beauty and care that is also ours.

I finish writing this critical text imagining myself, as I have done many times before, in one of these paintings. Listening to Sade, reading Toni Morrison, and realizing, more each day, beauty as a method.

Lorraine Mendes