Aislan Pankararu is one of the newest artists to enter the increasingly prestigious scene of Contemporary Indigenous Art, which has opened up a range of expressions of the cosmological richness, until then practically ignored, of the native peoples of Brazil. Before him, Jaider Esbell, Denilson Baniwa, Daiara Tukano, the Mahku, and others, in addition to the various Yanomami who had produced formidable drawings since the 1970s, up to the Venezuelan Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, had already made it clear that a new dimension of visual arts was being introduced in the country. And it was here to stay.

 

Thus, Aislan's work is part of this collective, of these multiple voices that affirm, value and resonate ways of being and knowing that originate in other logics, expanding the scope of our perception. The effects of this process are only just beginning to be felt – the understanding of what this might mean has barely been outlined. But its impact is already undeniable in the Brazilian art circuit.

 

In this context, although recent, the presence of Aislan Pankararu stands out. Above all, for his undeniable talent, manifested in drawings and paintings that surprise the viewer with their mastery of the work, the originality of their figurations, the precise balance of their compositions, the ease and mastery of the line, the titles of the works, in short, for the power of an art that is youthful and, nevertheless, already mature.

 

The question then arises: How is this possible? The perplexity revealed by the question becomes more acute when one knows that the experience of art is, for Aislan, something new; that until recently, Medicine occupied a large part of his attention and activity; that he learned in solitude, the result of what the critic Maurice Blanchot calls an inescapable “demand” and not a choice or whim. In short, this was and is possible because a greater force set and sets Aislan’s art in motion, revealing its necessity.

 

When we follow his trajectory, from his first works in 2019 until now, it is easy to detect two great imperatives that make art the ever-renewed result of a demand. First, the imperative of belonging to a people, the Pankararu people, which emerges in the reinterpretation of the vibrant and dancing Praiá (ritual fiber clothing) and in the continuous and varied reworking of body painting – it is this that makes the white, wide and intense line the emblem of its visuality. On the other hand, there is the imperative of belonging to a land, the Sertão, the caatinga, which returns nostalgically and insistently, and explodes in the colors and shapes of the mandacaru. Thus, belonging to a people and belonging to a land are internalized, mulled over, reinvented, until they reemerge reconfigured and redesigned in pictorial flows that find outlet on the canvas or on paper. It is no coincidence that the artist uses the word “trance” to name his artistic activity; but be careful: trance, here, is not used as a metaphor, but rather as an altered state, controlling what happens in terms of creation.

 

Everything happens, then, as if Aislan were undertaking a return to an ancestral condition that claims to be alive, here and now. But this is not a willful, false, or purely intellectual affirmation. Without access to this ancestral condition there would be no drawing or painting, because there would be no energy that nourishes action, the taking of form. Aislan, therefore, deserves the inclusion of the term Pankararu in his artistic name.

 

And yet, at the same time, the artist does not hide or try to erase a very important period of his education and career; namely, his studies in Medicine, and what he learned from them. In fact, here he expresses a sense of belonging of another order – that of science. Because the images are also informed by knowledge of Histology, cellular activity, blood circulation... which emerge in circles, in little balls – true cell nuclei – in “fractal, germinal waves”. In this sense, instead of an opposition and contradiction between traditional and modern knowledge, the drawings and paintings make the ancestral demands of the physiology of a man who lives in the modern world reverberate, in a body that understands itself as contemporary indigenous. A body that screams, bleeds, rushes, withdraws, explores, listens to itself, in constant recreation... a body that is a flower of pain.