Phrase by the artist for the series Cada voz [Each Voice] (2021), a project by Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural. Available at: <youtu.be/7Q-da6pJC6A?si=r1lJegnrCmlivimk>. Access: 2025.
Moisés Patrício operates at the crossroads. Like Eshu, his work moves between times, spaces, and materialities. The orisha, associated with communication and language, governs the artist, alongside the principles of Candomblé, in both life and art. Patrício appropriates established languages in contemporary art to propose a dialogical reparation: to occupy the traditionally white circuit, bringing the Afro-Brazilian worldview to the center of the discussion. He defines this operation as his “Eshuistic place of action,”1 a field of displacement and re-signification in which the hegemonic discourse is challenged by ancestral knowledge.
In the Brasilidades [Brazilianness] series (2020-2022), this confrontation takes the form of hybrid sculptures, in which cement cubes, reminiscent of brutalist construction logic, engulf liturgical ceramic objects from Candomblé, such as alguidares, quartinhas, and clay vessels. Cement, the material of modern architecture and exclusionary urban planning, imprisons and fossilizes the vessels, which, largely made by hand, carry within them the circularity of form and time, the transmission of knowledge, and the life in a circle. The encounter between opposites – the square and the circle, the hard and the malleable, the straight and the curvilinear – exposes the erasure of the symbolic marks of Afro-Brazilian cultures in shaping the nation’s imagination.
In the Brasilidades [Brazilianness] series (2020-2022), this confrontation takes the form of hybrid sculptures, in which cement cubes, reminiscent of brutalist construction logic, engulf liturgical ceramic objects from Candomblé, such as alguidares, quartinhas, and clay vessels. Cement, the material of modern architecture and exclusionary urban planning, imprisons and fossilizes the vessels, which, largely made by hand, carry within them the circularity of form and time, the transmission of knowledge, and the life in a circle. The encounter between opposites – the square and the circle, the hard and the malleable, the straight and the curvilinear – exposes the erasure of the symbolic marks of Afro-Brazilian cultures in shaping the nation’s imagination.
In metaphysics, impenetrability is the quality of matter that prevents two bodies from occupying the same space at the same time. In Brasilidades, this condition takes on a political dimension: the objects embedded in cement speak of the struggle for territory, the violence of colonization, and the erasure of symbols of Black culture in public space. Spatial control, whether in modern urbanism or the organization of space in art, is a strategy of domination. Against this, Patrício affirms permanence – the body that resists and insists on existing.
The artist’s work transforms three-dimensional space into territory, into a field of questioning, as forms, materials, and meanings confront one another. Brasilidades does not seek synthesis or harmony but exposes the fractures and contradictions that shape Brazilian identity. Between the circle and the square, between ancestral Afrodiasporic tradition and colonial imposition, Moisés Patrício forces us to confront the uncomfortable question: what is Brazilian identity, and who has the right to define it?
