“The codes of a community are decoded by its members;
The codes of the variant system are decoded only by its members.” i

Bunseki Fu-Kiau

Life is essentially a process of continuous and mutual communication. In Bantu-Kongo cosmology, an individual lives and moves within an ocean of waves. Communication is this process of emitting and receiving “waves and radiations.” The dikenga, the cosmogram, upholds the belief that each individual or community follows a life cycle comparable to the different positions of the sun, evoking the continuity of life, independent of physical death. This is a way of living and experiencing time—we are relational beings who exist and interact within a cyclical time.

This circularity and interweaving of life and spirituality are the foundations of Cipriano’s work. The current exhibition at the Nonada gallery, Saravá the Invisible, presents works from the series Macumba Pictórica, large-scale paintings on cotton sheets, and drawings on paper, where the artist invites us into a liminal space between the visible and the invisible, the sacred and the profane, body and spirit. The performative paintings present a set of ritualistic and speculative gestures that weave together memory, movement, and spirituality.

Drawing from his personal journey, his relationship with the terreiro (Afro-Brazilian spiritual community), and the use of symbolic materials—cotton, charcoal, and pemba—Cipriano creates a unique lexicon that captures and exposes his spiritual journey. Here, art-making is also a ritualistic performance. The cotton carries within it the history of plantations and the transatlantic trade, but it is also a fabric that covers and embraces the body, a second skin. Lime paint stains and transforms the whiteness of the sheets, creating dynamic marks, while charcoal traces time-space and suggests possibilities for inscription in the world. The pemba (sacred chalk) consecrates the writing.

By bringing the practice of the terreiro into his art-making, Cipriano introduces an idea of drawing-thinking subordinated to time to be marked—each stroke is an invocation, a corporeal gesture, that, like the lines traced in terreiros, functions as writing, as language.

Completing this lexicon is the word—song, drums, and music, ancestral communication methods and technologies that activate collective memory. The sung points enhance this intertwining of the everyday, the sacred, and the profane. Repetition and layering (of techniques and materials) form a methodology of memorization, emphasizing the circularity present in the terreiros and the dikenga, revealing a multitude of meanings—the sheets of Cipriano are small territories, pieces of a transient archive that carry a multitude of material cultures interconnected by a shared history, technologies of resistance, regeneration, and healing.

Cipriano does not simply illustrate a way of being; the artist performs a unique worldview in his life and his art-making. In Saravá the Invisible, we are invited to join this dance, to participate in this community, and to learn its codes, to (re)discover and weave narratives that connect us as human beings in perpetual motion. Saravá the Invisible!

Paula Nascimento

i Fu-Kiau, Kimbwandènde Kia Bunseki. African cosmology of the BÂNTU-kôngo: Tying the spiritual knot: Principles of life & living. Brooklyn, N.Y: Athelia Henrietta Press, Pub. in the name of Orunmila, 2001.