Gaps (with Francisco Leão)

When I turned 21, my father handed me the ring with the family crest in a simple gesture in front of his family in Alagoas. This ceremony meant to me being acknowledged as an adult. But it also meant my induction into a long patriarchal tradition that lost its meaning with each new generation of men. The ring was passed down to the first son of the first son in each generation, while the father received his father’s ring, bearing the stone used as a mold for the son’s ring. All of this, in my generation, was quite questionable. The original foto captured a detail that greatly illustrates the point: aunt Margot, who had never had children of her own but was respected as the matriarch and leader of the family, applauding in approval in the corner. See, the family was lead by a woman, my female cousins were studying to take on important positions in their fields, being the firstborn meant nothing anymore and the family slowly left the sugar business which had garnered it so much status for so long. The handing of the ring had become a nice tradition, albeit a senseless one.

I kept the ring in a small safe in my bedroom. I’m almost sure it was taken during renovations of our apartment. The entire safe was taken. The theft of that ring was a personal failure of mine. I had failed as the adult I was supposed to be, incapable even of adequately handling a family heirloom, and I felt how badly it reflected in the family’s overall impression of me. My own father’s overall impression of me. For a time, I considered remaking the ring, using my father’s ring. But the shame for the failure was such that I didn’t allow myself to even ask for his jewel. I lived with that failure for twenty years.

The decade of 2020 brought along other reasons for estrangement, many due to our different political views, much like what happened to many other artists of that time. I spoke to my father less and less and with mounting tension. Meanwhile, I read up and gained increasing interest in matters of fatherhood within the discussion about masculinity. My situation with many father was a glaring gap and a flaw in my art practice as well: for how could I say I had n understanding of these matters when I couldn’t even foster a healthy relationship with my own father?

In 2022, I undertook the process of creating a new ring, this one with my own lion. It was to be a comment on our family’s history as well. It symbolized another path for the name. In a sort of counter-ceremony, I gave on to my father, in reparation of the ring I lost, and kept a second one. Sitting on the couch in front of my grandfather’s checkerboard-patterned painting, we spoke at length. About growing up as a man, about fatherly advice. And about the gaps.

In the painting, the original ceremony took on the meaning it had for me: the act of handing down to a son the privilege, the knowledge, the burden and the gaps of a familial manhood. Hence the reason for the inclusion of the checkerboard patterns that my paternal grandfather painted in his spare time (he was a chemical engineer who loved modernist abstraction). And the reason my father and I are dressed the same (something that happened by chance that day). In my reinterpretation, I altered the color of our shirts and rendered our pants with a few gaps, striving to get closer to the colors and patterns of the honeybee drones that swarmed my other paintings. The original family crest is presented on the corner (in aunt Margot’s place) as a memory of that past, and the QR code above it leads to a brief form with a single question: “What had you hoped your father would teach you?”. I had hopes other people would share their own gaps in their experience of fatherhood, like the ones I had experienced.

Gaps (with Francisco Leão)

November 2023

Oil, encaustic, varnish and solvent transfer on recycled paper and gesso.

95 x 95 cm