André Vargas

André Vargas is a visual artist, poet, composer, and educator. Vargas works on reclaiming his ancestry as a way to understand the foundations of linguistic, religious, historical, and aesthetic cultures of Brazilian identity in which he is immersed, with popular culture serving as the main indicator of this foundation. The suburbs, rural areas, and other places of personal and collective memory surrounding this ancestry serve as the empirical starting point for his conceptual postulations.

Graduated in Philosophy from UFRJ, Vargas questions the hegemonies that indicate a singular history by recounting and responding to his own family history, drawing on the religious forces that reconnect him to the Afrocentricity of his gestures. Voice, evocation, and conversation create layers of meaning in his works through the combination of word and image. Along this path, the constant presence of absence reaffirms the infinite possibilities, where any certainty about the sacred and the profane slips away through grace.

Critic Marcelo Campos writes: 

André Vargas comes from a family of enslaved people on a coffee and cotton plantation, Fazenda dos Saldanha, in Chiador, Minas Gerais… 

However, resisting the colonial logic, the family, in subsequent generations, bought their own land. With his ancestry as a driving force, the artist’s work is full of reverence for souls and pretos velhos, his ancestors, vibrating in recodified altars and oratories…