“Quentchura”: remixing the abstract with the sacred in Kboco´s work

Since always, we have used imagery to communicate ideas between ourselves or with the divinities. In other words, there has always been an intention to formalize something that we can only access through imagination.

The Croatian image theorist, Krešimir Purgar, observes that the desire for abstraction is not a characteristic of modern art, although avant-garde artists in the early 20th century produced abstract art and wrote about it [1]. However, the often obscured aspect of abstraction thinking in the context of modern art - if not obscured, at least minimized or underestimate - is the importance given to the spiritual as content. For artists like Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, abstract art aimed to represent feeling, emotion, the immaterial, and the ineffable. The term “representation” may seem inadequate when discussing abstract art, but there was an understanding at that time that such particularities of human subjectivity could be presented not necessarily through known forms.

It is in this sense of materializing something unspeakable and without correspondence in the world of phenomena that Kboco's work is established. Between the ritualistic dimension of magic and urban experience, his three-dimensional works and paintings evoke symbols from diverse cultures while creating others. His spiritualist practices meet hip-hop and Brazilian street culture, as this great cultural composting serves as language and subject for the artist.

An observer of communication codes - from graffiti and pixo to mystical symbologies and contemporary electronic music - Kboco elaborates his forms based on those provided by his surroundings. A milieu that is already mixed and blended, with no discernible boundaries between where one culture ends and another one begins, nor their points of origin (if they indeed existed).

Given this artistic procedure, the resulting works are as mysterious as they are familiar to our senses. They resemble totems, archaic monuments, esoteric objects. They therefore relate to forms that we recognize, even if we cannot directly “read” their meanings, since the lexicon created by Kboco is his own. The work materializes itself in our transcendental experience through the objects it produces. Timeless, they could invoke non-human powers, as some cultures believe; they would connect us to other dimensions and magical beings.

Although there is no figuration, abstract art can be considered representational if it pertains to non-visual or non-material content. The British philosopher Richard Wollheim asserts the difference between representation and figuration:

“We should not confuse the representational content of a painting with its figurative content. The idea of representational content is much broader than that of figurative content. The representational content of a painting derives from what can be seen in it. The figurative content derives from what one sees in it and can be brought under non-abstract concepts, like table, map, window, woman [2].”

If we follow this conceptual division, we can perceive in Kboco's work the possibility of representing esoteric imaginaries. In a similar direction, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint understood that her paintings transmit meanings from her spiritual masters. Researchers have noted that it is possible to decode the vocabulary present in the artist's paintings from a study of her formal lexicon associated with the understanding of her spiritual beliefs, aided by the notes recorded in her notebooks.

Likewise, the same exercise would likely be possible in the case of Kboco. However, why would we unveil hidden messages if what interests us in his work is to stand before something that suspends us from the daily automatism of life? Why not to simply engage with paintings and sculptures that provoke our memory, imagination, and perception of time - internal, individual, historical, collective - experiencing this sensation that mixes intuition, rationality, and trance?

Kboco produces geometric elements that cover supports made of wood, canvas, and wall without executing projects. According to the artist, there is something in his work process comparable to the altered state of consciousness of shamans. Af Klint reported a similar experience when creating certain paintings. We have been separated from the mystical senses of our relationship with art; since then, it is not a rational sense we seek, but the very sensation of elevation that art has ancestrally provided us.

In terms of approach, the mixing of symbols, both appropriated and even created by Kboco, approaches the strategy of the Indigenous Denesuline-Saulteaux artist Alex Janvier, who passed away this year. Janvier, having been forcibly taken during childhood by the Canadian state, grew up in boarding schools and, upon recognition of his artistic ability, was sent to study at fine arts schools. Addressing the violence of pedagogical imposition on Indigenous peoples, Janvier created paintings that mix symbols associated with his ancestry with forms reminiscent of those disseminated by artists of the European abstract avant-garde, such as Kandinsky and Miró.
In the same manner, Kboco's abstract art gathers symbols of multiple origins - Hindu, Buddhist, ancient Egyptian, contemporary Brazilian urban cultures, local and African ancestries - that traverse human histories as codes. His approach aligns with the practice of sampling music - whereby cutting and pasting reformulates what has been heard while paying homage to artists and times that have passed.

The title of the exhibition, “Quentchura”, follows the method of remixing: to what has or produces heat is added the “tchu” from “tchutchuca” or “tchutchuco” - terms used to refer to someone pleasant and affectionate (by the way, it is said to be a term popularized by carioca funk in the early 2000s). In this text, the combination of a diversity of snippets of voices from different realities highlights the breadth of the relationship between abstract art, symbols, and spirituality. Kboco's bubbling work evokes this polyphony, erasing hierarchies between times, agents, and cultures. It points to the essentiality of the sacred in our existence.

 

Ana Avelar