In Amnésia, Flávio Cerqueira presents a black boy with arms raised to pour a bucket of white paint over his head; the paint drips over the body but does not permeate him. The work refers to the whitening of the Brazilian population, in which European immigration to the country starting in the 19th century also had the perverse role of making the population less black. One of the work’s central points is the can of paint, which is nearly empty. It would be possible to interpret it as a depletion of the whitening process. The bronze sculpture—one of the noblest and more robust materials, with strong links to traditional sculpture but little used in today’s contemporary art, especially when it comes to more politicized themes—seems to have been done specifically as an antidote to the forgetting of such histories which we always should be aware of, therefore underscoring its symbolic and materially robust character.
— Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, Tomás Toledo, Chief Curator , MASP
By Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo
São Paulo native Flávio Cerqueira debates racial issues in his work. In Amnesia, Cerqueira presents a black boy with arms raised to pour a bucket of white paint over his head; the paint drips over the body but does not permeate him. The work refers to the whitening of black Brazilians, in which European immigration starting in the 19th century also had the perverse role of making the population less black. One of the work’s central points is the can of paint, which is nearly empty. It would be possible to interpret it as a depletion of the whitening process. The bronze sculpture— one of the noblest and more robust materials, with strong links to traditional sculpture but little used in today’s contemporary art, especially when it comes to more politicized themes—seems to have been done specifically as an antidote to the forgetting of such histories which we always should be aware of, therefore underscoring its symbolic and materially indestructible character.
— Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, Tomás Toledo, Chief Curator , MASP, 2020