Miguel Afa lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He began his journey through graffiti in 2001 on the streets and alleys of Complexo do Alemão and attended the School of Fine Arts - UFRJ. His work addresses a reading of the peripheral body, counterposing the unfavorable aspects to which these bodies are subjected and proposing another imagistic reading that enhances the understanding of affection. At times, they are simple and full of sensitivity images, while at other times, they present a direct political message. But what his gaze captures gains its own aura with the colors he uses; his muted palette is a fundamental component in his composition, further deepening the representation. His color is not naive; it is also discourse, a stance on the scenes depicted, fading is a reminder of what is seen and what is invisibilized. The artist has already exhibited his work in Brazil, Italy, and soon in Portugal.

The tremor and the earthy: Miguel Afa
Of earth and tremor. Of confrontation with the world and with the support itself. Earthy with feet that do not get dirty. The earth does not dirty; it grounds. Tremor that displaces what was given as fixed and opens up to a time lived in the effort to seek something beyond terror.

Earthy: all tones are lowered. Everything is of the order of monumental silence. The brush in a state of tremor, the support in a state of tremor. A continuous game of rewriting the world from the encounter of the body with painting. Understand this: from the artist's body with matter and form. Beyond the represented black body, which Miguel Afa displaces in his most recent works to an atmosphere of the dreamlike.

Miguel: "exhaustion is not about the presence of the black body. But the exhaustion of this body, represented based on the same recurrences and without the complexity of formal painting discussions." Or even compulsorily for a black artist and his insertion in the contemporary Brazilian white art system.

An easy beyond-image that projects into something that sounds like ruin but is construction. In fact, from the confrontation between nature and construction, some of the works in this exhibition arise. The plant breaks the brick. But what is in tension there is not the plant, not the brick. It is time. The time of the backyard ground taken over by concrete in the desire to build life for an idea of better. There is no judgment here. There is indeed a negotiation between times. And, sometimes, times and landscapes will be on the same support but in different, juxtaposed, penetrable planes – since time can also be simultaneity. They can be planes that, when gathered and apparently in conflict, build narratives. There is no abandonment of the narrative, so present in Miguel Afa's previous works; there is indeed a new complexity in what we see.

Talking to Miguel, he told me: "For some, the foot that steps on the earth is dirty; for us, it's not." For some, the layers and layers of paint may sound dirty; for him, they do not. For an artist knowledgeable about art history, nothing is accidental. To fabulate the earth in its different senses required this young artist from Rio a relationship that goes through the heritage of Western-named painting but is undeniably Brazilian. I believe that at this point in Afa's career, there is no doubt that we are facing one of the most important painters of his generation. However, I want to emphasize here that his excellence comes from daily labor in the tremor of processes. Miguel is an artist who has already surpassed the phase of ideas that want to seem like accomplished work. He knows that an idea is the beginning, but art is work, daily toil, a search for the right execution that allows poetry to emerge. Afa constantly ensures [or reiterates]: I want to be relevant. This mental note points to a necessary path of constant exploration. Miguel does it!

The current tremors as change will also often inhabit a new relationship between the artist and the plane from which his images emerge. A poetics of terms in earthy tones that does not present rubble, projecting the beauty that resides in the boy amid the bad weather landscape, bending down to pick up the kite. There is flight even when everything seems to contradict it. Nothingness Miguel Afa 2023 By the way, the kite in Miguel's iconography was delivered in a conversation between the young Afa and the elder Araújo: Emanoel Araújo. Called to think about this encounter and form, Afa understood that a kite flying in the CPX sky is also a geometric structure made up of areas of color. From that conversation between young Afa and elder Araújo, the first movements of this painter with the geometric and something abstract as possible paths for poetry and life arise.

There are stories, even when a succession of kites aligns as an exercise in chromatic rhythm. There are stories of art too. Stories of a Brazilian art that goes through the community and is presented by the hands/minds of some artists, like Afa, and that shake up essentialized views of what the relationship between an artist and his territories can be. The idea that Miguel's painting can only be explained by his origin, only holds if we also understand that the same applies to an artist born in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Otherwise, it is just a classist bias of exclusionary artistic readings.

In one of the key paintings of this new production by Miguel, we find in the Penha gallery a painting of 3m (?)... in it where a succession of landscapes meet and disengage. What would be fragments presents itself as an experience of a landscape that can only be accessed through art and mastery of pictorial language. There, the tremor and the earthy come together. The earthy palette settles the landscape in tremor. A landscape that makes us call Glissant again, who in "Archipelago Conversations" (2023) responds to Hans Ulrich Obrist:

"Live the landscape with passion. Remove it from the indistinct, investigate it, illuminate it among us. Know what it means within us. Take this clear knowledge to the earth. If the solution seems difficult, perhaps even unattainable, don't go out shouting that everything is wrong. Don't take advantage of reality to justify your failures. Instead, fulfill your dreams to deserve your reality. Enhance the heat and strengthen yourself from it. Your thought will burn."

It is undeniable that Glissant and Afa meet in the tremor and the earthy. In poetry, art, and the construction of worlds beyond the immediate. Worlds and possibilities that some called utopian. But in Afa, it is language, mastery, knowledge, and a production that moves in the time of constant maturation in the poetics of a rare painter, with feet on the ground and aware that the tremor is the necessary impulse to make the kite fly.