In 2010, Toz met Insonia. We could say that it was created, but its implications in the artist's work are so profound that they seem to go beyond the person who revealed it, leading us to believe in a possible mythological existence a priori of this creature, with wills, ambitions and humor of its own.

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Insonia, which grew and gradually showed its people and culture. Gradually expressing himself in the plurality of his appearances, he is a character analogous to the imaginary of different traditions. It is possible to think of him under the archetype of the trickster, an ambiguous and playful entity, being able to find parallels with Hermes, Mercury, the Joker, and in the Brazilian and African contexts, as a deity as controversial as it is beloved: Exu.

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Insonia is both the trickster from Lapa, Seu Zé Pelintra, and the troublemaker Saci-Pererê. Just like this one, which only becomes visible when you fall into drowsiness - a state suspended between sleep and wakefulness in which it is difficult to distinguish the dreamlike from the plausible - the creature began to reveal itself to the artist during his sleepless nights. It was in these blurred borders between delirium and linearity, between individual and collectivity that its existence and its phenomenon took place. It is a manifestation of this universal mythology in the artist's particular universe.

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As a facet of this archetype, it is possible to think of the figure of the graffiti artist. When observing him from the perspective of art history, we perceive this curious and indefinable actor who comes from the streets, goes to the gallery, eludes the white cube, returns to the urban in an unprecedented monumentality, not revealing to us his place of (dis)belonging. Maybe because I don't have it and don't want to have it. Its pertinence lies precisely in the fraying of limits and their eternal inadequacy.

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The graffiti artist, like Insonia, like Exu, when we believe it is possible to understand them, elude us and assume a new form, a new discourse in an eccentric and irreverent kaleidoscopic pantomime that distorts our notions of linearity, territory and identity.

 

Felippe Moraes