Identity and belonging are part of the conceptual repertoire of the Rio de Janeiro artist Sergio Allevato.

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Sergio appropriates an apparently innocent ichnography to discuss the ways of maintaining colonial discourses.

 

On a personal level his work talks about ancestry and on a political level about sovereignty and submission. By using images that refer to the “lifestyle”, American and European, from signs widely enthroned in our culture, often even ironically, the artist questions himself about our formation and action as a people.

 

Through a strategy of festive tones, the artist opens up a universe of decadence and ruin. Still far from themselves, Brazilian races and genders struggle to regain old rights, maintain others and still survive amidst the intervention of hatred. The artist’s work presents us on a global scale contemporary standards of control and submission.

 

In this sad scenario of current world politics, we continue to lack legitimate identity discourses, far from the exaltation of our race and our color and with our backs turned to our many gods. Eternally punished by that first perfect and longed for world. We are living in intense diaspora, we’ve never been so absent and we’ve never needed ourselves so much.

Wagner Nardy

Independent curator, Brazil