Catalogue Notes
Blending ancestral cosmology with contemporary urgency, Jaider Esbell, a Macuxi artist from Brazil’s northern Amazon, created an art that is as poetic as it is political. Largely self-taught, he rejected academic hierarchies: “I never took a course in art history,” he told ArtReview in 2021, shortly before his tragic death. “But from early on, I had access to cosmology… another type of art.” For Esbell, art was never separate from the world—it was the world. “Mount Roraima is an Indigenous work of art, a mythological, cosmological work of art,” he continued, created by the ancestor Makunaimî “long before Europe existed, long before a museum existed in Europe.” By claiming cosmology itself as art, Esbell upended the canon and insisted on an art history centered in the Amazon.
Often set ablaze with fluorescent motifs against dense black grounds, Esbell’s canvases evoke new worlds inspired by his Indigenous teachings. In 2016, Esbell abandoned his job as a lineman to embark on a spiritual journey that would inform his “artivism,” a term he coined to define his practice. “I started to walk a lot in the world, I met many shamans — pajés, xamãs — from different peoples. And they begin to guide me, to expand my awareness to larger cosmogonic issues,” he explained.
That guidance shaped not only his worldview but also the formal language of his art. For Esbell, the black ground was not a backdrop but an astral field: “The black background would be emptiness, collapse, and the small fragment of colored paint begins to arouse, to promote again the reintegration of life,” he has stated. “These paintings, in a way, have the support, the instruction of masters of thought from various cosmologies, who nourish me with these visions through rituals, through ancient practices. And then I, as an ‘artist’, start to do a kind of download, accessing information from this environment, bringing it to our material, everyday nature. In short, transforming it into a ‘work of art.’”
Esbell’s art bridges myth and modernity, beauty and critique. But to him the role of the Indigenous artist was more than a mode of self-expressive, it was critical: “To be an Indigenous artist is to claim, through these four letters—A R T E—everything that connects us to possibilities and to bridging worlds.”
Rooted in pedagogy and a collective awakening, Esbell merged art and activism to establish “artivism.” Painting, curating, writing, and performance were never discrete pursuits but interconnected tools for opening dialogue. He envisioned “artivism” as the foundation of an Indigenous art ecology that could operate alongside, and in resistance to, the institutions built on colonialism and exploitative capitalism. “Artivism is this place for us to take those things that don’t reach the mainstream media, because of machismo, patriarchy,” he explained. Adding that, “We are in this fight, a fight for life, for territory.”
His paintings, performances, and curatorial projects were the bridges he encouraged his fellow Indigenous artists to pursue—between ancestral knowledge and global art, between myth and politics, between the Amazon and the museum. As his shaman mentors taught him: “Art is our knowledge; it is capable of recreating the world.”
