Humanimality and Vibratile Bodies
Paulo Herkenhoff

The installation Zodiac (2024) by Paulo Lobo consists of six large, fluttering banners installed outdoors at the Centro Cultural Serrinha, alongside the work of Franco-Tunisian artist Jean Paul Ganen, renowned for his land art with plants. This is part of the 22nd Arte Serrinha Festival, a brilliant creation by Fábio Delduque, this year dedicated to transatlantic Lusophony, held in Bragança Paulista, São Paulo. Painted on both sides, each banner symbolizes a dialogue between pairs of beings.

In the pair Juana Azurduy and Oxóssi, Paulo Lobo uniquely intertwines South American social formation with a liberatory perspective, bringing together Indigenous peoples and Africa, female and male, like a union between the Andean warrior Juana Azurduy, a heroine who fought for Bolivia’s independence, and Oxóssi, the warrior orisha. This pairing recalls the song A Fonte de Paulus V (1986) by Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, where the cavalry of Jorge (Oxóssi in Bahia) passes by, wielding his axe – “eparrei, eparrei, eparrei!”

Lobo used his own shadow to outline his painted Oxóssi at his property in Itatiba. This recalls Sombra minha, a self-portrait photograph by Mário de Andrade taken at Tarsila do Amaral’s property in Santa Teresa do Alto on January 1, 1927.

The pair Buriti and Sumé combines two beings from Indigenous mythology. Sumé is the Tupi god of laws and wisdom. In the power axis, Sumé is a foundational myth, while the Buriti Palace is the seat of the executive power of the Federal District government. Sumé taught the knowledge of using manioc, fire, and social organization, but after being disobeyed by his people, he disappeared with the promise of returning one day to punish them. Meanwhile, the Buriti palm tree has the ecological function of preserving water sources. From the perspective of “Amerindian perspectivism” (as defined by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Tânia Stolze Lima), there is a relational nature between beings and the composition of the world. In Amazonian Indigenous traditions, there is no hierarchy between humans, animals, plants (like Buriti), and minerals, as beings with souls recognize themselves and those related to them as human, but they are perceived by other beings in the form of animals, spirits, or non-human entities. Therefore, the Buriti and Sumé pair operates as a construction of shared humanity, achieved through the construction of bodies, as depicted in Paulo Lobo’s painting.

On one side of four of the banners is an animal, and on the other, a person, as if one were the reverse of the other. Paulo Lobo invokes Michel Surya’s concept of humanimality, which is summarized as “the ineliminable animality of man.” The humanimal relations defined in Zodiac occur in four pairs.

“One day I was pulled / Simply pulled / And I was drawn closer by this hot breath that looked at me / They were two giant eyes and a hot breath / That eye / That eye fed me / It put me / Put me in its hand / And there I sucked its blood / And that blood allowed me to start growing […] / I saw those people almost like food / With a curiosity / But there I was, next to this king […] / The king decided that I should have the position of minister / And minister I became […]” (Paulo Lobo, The Flea).

The first pair is The Flea and The Madman. Lobo reinterprets the tempera painting The Ghost of a Flea (1819–1820) by William Blake. Here, the concepts of ghostly, phantasmatic, and figural are invoked. It has been said that for psychoanalysis, the phantom is an articulation between an emptied enjoyment and a rediscovered enjoyment as residue. For Jacques Lacan, what the neurotic fears most is castration. Here, there is a ghostly fusion between the flea (a residue of art history) and madness at the extreme of neurosis. At this point, it is worth referencing the concept of the figural as defined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his analysis of the human figure imagined by painter Francis Bacon. Deleuze observed how the rupture with the figurative occurred in modern painting through the denial of the figure (in various forms of abstractionism) and the affirmation of the figural against figuration, as in chaotic states, it is not enough for a form to merely configure itself. In Zodiac, the forms of living or enchanted beings are co-moved by wind energy, adding kinetic intensity and enervation to the support, transforming them into vibratile bodies. In Lobo’s painting, the hysteria of the madman results in art.

Instinct, from the Latin instinctu, is innate to the living being. The humanimal conflation in The Wasp and The Pregnant Woman deals with physical pain and the instinct for survival in the animal world. The sting of the tarantula hawk wasp, represented here by Paulo Lobo, is the most painful in the world, reaching level 4 on the Schmidt Pain Index, which measures sting intensity. The pregnant woman is destined for the pain of childbirth. Generally, the human body can only endure forty-five units of pain, but during childbirth, a woman endures up to fifty-seven units, as if twenty bones were being broken simultaneously. The wasp stings to defend against attacks, while procreation by the pregnant woman stems from the instinct to maintain the species. However, Freud revealed that this primordial instinct for species preservation has been replaced by the pleasure principle, driven by irresistible impulses of joy and voluptuousness beyond one’s will, and not by some elevated motive.

The humanimality of the image pair Tortoises and Minotaura occurs as a meeting of two mythologies about time. Among Indigenous peoples, the cosmogonic legend of the tortoise is linked to the idea of persistence (the meaning of the word tortoise in Tupi), long life (tortoises live an average of eighty years, with some reaching one hundred), as it is an animal that escapes being eaten by hiding in its burrows. “For Indigenous people, the character’s form does not matter, but the content of what is intended to be taught,” explains Daniel Munduruku. The Greek legend of the Minotaur is a struggle between life and death. Half-man, half-bull, the cannibalistic monster that ate people alive was confined to a labyrinth where it was killed by Theseus, who escaped with his life. Paulo Lobo’s invention of a female Minotaura is a contradictio in terminis, since etymologically the term tauro refers to a bull, not admitting, except through the painter’s poetic invention, its female form. However, Minotaura affirms: “I am painted, therefore I exist.” In the context of this diacritical pair in Zodiac and the resistance of materials, Theseus is the tortoise, corresponding to the hero’s apple and the animal’s shell.

What could a Shark-Jaguar be? What is a painter? These questions are answered at the Serrinha Festival by the pair formed by a fierce amphibious being and, in its reverse, by the artist-being. The Shark-Jaguar is a predator of both water and land, while the Painter’s brush crawls over the surface of the canvas. Some artists prey on the symbolic value of the Other—at the dawn of photography, there were those who thought the new medium stole the soul of the photographed. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty affirmed that our embryology and biology are full of gradients (in The Eye and the Spirit), just as Paulo Lobo operates in his humanimal works. In the same text, Merleau-Ponty warns that the painter’s vision is a continuous birth, and the invisible of my body invests itself in other bodies I see.

Paulo Lobo’s painting substantiates and amalgamates paint, body, and flesh. In The Eye and the Spirit, Merleau-Ponty corroborates Paul Valéry’s position that the painter lends his body to the world. Paulo Lobo lends his body to the signs of his Zodiac. The language of painting is not instituted by nature, but Paulo Lobo reinstitutes nature. The entire Zodiac is not identical; it is a constant, ascientific becoming of beings, a metamorphosis of the signifier/signified axis, a shifting of the meaning of zodiacal signs, a chimeric mutability, a visual hallucination. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state that “the proper name is the instant apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive understood as such in a field of intensity.” Mutatis mutandis, the name of the artist Paulo Lobo is, in itself, a centaur of his Zodiac, half-wolf, half-man.

Fotos: Ricardo Takamura
Drone: Celino Pires