To flaunt is to be alive: Panmela Castro | curated by Daniela Labra

The artist's trajectory began in the suburb of Rio de Janeiro, becoming spontaneously interested in painting as a child, and living in her youth the universe of graffiti in the city's alleys. Panmela Castro graduated in arts and a decade ago founded Rede Nami, a project of awareness through art against gender violence. Her multidisciplinary activities have already taken her to international congresses, artistic institutions and urban culture events in many countries. On one generally speaking, her concerns address historically marginalized and peripheral groups, something that says about her own biography. However, Castro’s thinking and artistic practice, even if they include those themes, also extrapolate and escape the commonplace of the necessary - but sometimes predictably molded - identity discussions in the field of contemporary art.

Throughout her trajectory, Panmela Castro continued to reinvent herself artistically and politically until reaching the performance as a method of creation. Today, she develops works that are the result of long processes where art and life do not dissociate. This is the case of the portraits on canvas that we see at Luisa Strina Gallery. Paintings originated from experiences with people of different circles placed along the path that generated this exhibition in just eight months during the pandemic. The exhibition is then divided into five Constellations defined by the artist herself, each having as starting point an specific person who is central to the development of a respective set of works with several pieces generated by the related experiences. Each Constellation can be understood as a network that connects to each other, and makes the exhibition finally a body formed by multiple voices, materialities, characters, images.

“To flaunt is to be alive” brings the radical and restless aesthetic experimentation of Panmela Castro and the critical impulse of her actions which, in addition to being meticulously thought out, are not free from irony, humor, debauchery, and space for chance. The title makes the viewer reflect on self-esteem and the triumph of daily surviving a violent and extractive social system. The exhibition presents itself in a unorthodox media set as a grand narrative of encounters, rituals, and processes of transformation that communicate relationships of trust and chains of care. Thus, we see the profusion of supports and visualities carried out by images of the different people who inhabit or inhabited the artist's universe, that also include the spectator reflected in the mirrored surfaces of various pieces. The message pulses: we are unique beings, we deserve our self-love and respect from others without judgment.

“To flaunt is to be alive” is a show that is somehow self-referential, performative in its procedure and essentially mediatic, inspired by Gangstar visualities, spiritualists, queer, digital, academic, of pixação (illegal spray painting of public or particular property), and others. At the same time, the artist's theoretical, artistic, and aesthetic framework is vast, allusions ranging from Yoko Ono's propositions to Sophie Calle's literary-visual narratives, Catherine Opie's self-portraits, paintings by Rubem Valentim, sculptures and texts by Louise Bougeois, and several authors such as Lélia Gonzales, Angela Davies, Ana Claudia Lemos Pacheco, Freud, Nietzsche, Abdias Nascimento, Paul B. Preciado, Simone de Beauvoir, Didi-Huberman, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, among many other names in the arts, philosophy, and critical thinking.

The work of Panmela Castro therefore has many layers of understanding and reading possibilities that are not limited to diversity clichés that can easily be shaped by the market. Her pieces, propositions, environments embody the complex multiplicity of contemporary culture, turning into visual and plastic work accounts of existences, which affirm and enshrine themselves in the world in a political, original, and passionate way.

Daniela Labra