Statement letter · What would not fit into speech

To those who look,

Before the paint, there was light. I learned the world from atop a stage: directing actors, turning on the spotlights, dressing bodies that were not mine, raising sets that lasted one season and were then taken down in the dark. From the time I was a boy, I painted panels to announce other people's parties. Then came graphic design, a print shop in Nagoya, the newsrooms, the magazines, the meeting rooms. I spent half my life giving shape to what others needed to say.

Born in Paranavaí, I live in Curitiba. And it was here, in 2020, when the whole world learned to hold its breath, that I realized I was carrying too many scenes. Tragedies told in a low voice by those who witnessed them up close: streams, gunshots, mothers, cold shacks. None of it was mine, and all of it lived in me. I took a canvas of 118 by 180 centimeters and began to paint without asking the craft for permission. I painted, repainted, hid the picture beneath other versions of itself. When the line finally appeared, it was not style. It was breath.

Since then, there have been seventy-six works in five years, gathered into four phases that do not obey the calendar. The line became a circle. The circle became a face. The face warped until it smiled with too many teeth. I changed my language the way one sheds a skin, and I do not apologize for the convulsion: each phase is the same question asked by another throat.

I paint in acrylic and mixed media, on canvas, cardstock, printed adhesive and synthetic leather. I paint family, affection, urban violence, Carnival and silence. I paint the favela that was narrated to me, the bloco that pulls the street along, the dinner table where everyone poses with empty eyes. The colors are bright, but make no mistake: they are there to disguise the chaos and the provocations. In my painting, joy is a survival strategy.

I do not trust the clean surface. I lay down layer upon layer and leave some of them buried, because I believe that what is not seen also holds up what is seen. There are canvases that waited years for the final stroke. From Japan, where I lived for almost three years, I brought back a silent reverence for the gesture repeated until it becomes rite. That is why, even in excess, each layer is a prayer made by hand.

I do not ask you to like it. I ask you to feel. And, if you feel, to carry it. A work of mine does not want only a wall; it wants to live alongside you. It will look back at you, every day, and each day it will say something different.

This is the first of many letters. The other four tell, phase by phase, how I got here. Read them in order or out of it. Chaos, you will notice, never had a chronology.

Marcus Yabe, Curitiba