São Luís, MA, 1981
Thiago Martins de Melo's work emerges from intense and visceral fluxes, reflecting the cultural and socio-political complexity of the state of Maranhão, Brazil and Latin America. His work ranges from painting, drawing and sculpture to animation and installations to construct dense, highly symbolic visual narratives. With a striking style made up of thick layers, vibrant colors and a profusion of allegories, his works summon the body, and challenge the viewer's gaze. Each creation occurs at a point of tension which opposes subjective vibrations, everyday inventiveness and supernatural forces to the brutality of earthly life and structural oppressions. His compositions, charged and chaotic, meld together ancestral mythologies, popular culture, political struggle, armed conflict, syncretic rituals and metaphysical epiphanies. This anarchic and acronymic neo-baroque is populated with iconographic figures and esoteric systems, and features symbols, landscapes and phenomena imbued with magic, and which connect mundane territories and elements to extraterrestrial spiritual dimensions.