Pablo Lobato

[Bom Despacho, 1976. Lives and works in Belo Horizonte]

The work by the Minas Gerais artist Pablo Lobato featured in the show Além da Vanguarda presents a recurrent and highly symbolic image in the world of popular art: the church bell. In the history of the Bienal Naïfs do Brasil, there have been countless artworks in which church bells figure in scenes of public squares or festivities, always perched at the top of the bell towers of small churches in small cities and towns. It is precisely in Minas Gerais, Lobato’s state of birth, where some of the most precious churches of the baroque period are found. It was there that the artist carried out a research into the bells of different cities, many of them deactivated today, an investigation that resulted in a series of works that includes Bronze Revirado [Overturned Bronze] a video installation that we are presenting here.

As Jacopo Crivelli Visconti describes in a commentary on this work, “[U]pon investigating and studying this theme, the artist verified that the top of bell towers where bells are rung is the nearly exclusive domain of bell ringers (who in olden times were mostly slaves): neither the churchgoers nor the priests themselves go up there. That is, the artist recovers the visuality of an event of fundamental importance in the social fabric, whose image over the centuries has nevertheless been programmatically and methodically hidden and even denied”. Thus, in contrast to the excessive visibility of the image of the bell and the church in both the refined and popular pictorial depictions, what Lobato offers us is a ritual which, despite being carried out systematically over the centuries, remains concealed.

Shown here on a national scale and in a way that brings us behind the scenes of the church, to within the niche where the risky and nearly erotic choreography of the bell ringers transpires, Bronze Revirado retains all of its human character, revealing as suggested by Crivelli Visconti, “a sort of pagan trance […] which rips the stasis and the silence, to install the ecstasy”.

In this case it is we who glimpse in the background, through the opening of the bell tower, the public square, the regional festivities or the landscape of the small interior town.