32. ODOTERES RICARDO DE OZIAS​ - A SPACE BETWEEN THE ALTAR AND THE ALTERED.

David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street - LONDON.

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias, Que Perigo!, 2000, Oil on hardwood board, © Danielian Galeria, Courtesy Danielian Galeria and David Zwirner.

While Londoners left the city in search of sun this summer, a mass of paintings, bright with the light of Brazilian artist Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias (1940-2011) arrived. Seen for the first time in the UK - at David Zwirner's Grafton Street townhouse gallery, awaiting exhibition from the 1st of September.

Invited for a preview in July, I entered a room, white like a fresh sheet of paper, while an unboxing of paintings was in the process of being propped against the walls ahead of installation. Post-it notes colour coded three themes, agriculture, religion and carnival. As I listened to curator James Green introducing the works, I soon began to appreciate quite how extraordinary and contradictory the paintings on display are.

What appears to be a series of landscapes painted in a childlike, naive style take on an entirely different context when you realise that the works on display, were painted by someone in their fifties and sixties, who only began to draw at age 40. The decision to present this work, in this gallery at this time is conceptually fascinating.

Ozias presents a technicolour vision of a life in review - as if released from possession. His primary palettes clash in saturated celebration and heightened state contemplation - so much so that viewing in silence leaves the viewer deaf, only to hear your heartbeat pound - there is a noticeable colour of understanding that is unsaid yet implied - shades of joy, violence, repression and hysteria.

The mind whirrs for references, for visual clues and reason, but Ozias's genius seems to repel the reinterpretation of others - the works exist outside of the studied chapters of art history - his coded outpourings are a release not made from external sources but from internal processing - the intensity and rhythm of his paintings - concentrated to a hypnotic, teeming focus, suggest of a searching meditative approach to creation which provided catharsis to an individual who for the majority of their life worked hard within the mechanised systems of others.

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias, O Coro, 1999, Oil on hardwood board, © Danielian Galeria, Courtesy Danielian Galeria and David Zwirner.

The previous owner of the works Lucien Finkelstein (1931–2008), amassed a six thousand piece art collection within his lifetime, holding one of the most important independent collections of naïve art, a term initially used to describe the work of French self-taught modernist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). There are intriguing parallels between the visual style of the two men, both seem focused on a sense of anticipation within their works, with Rousseau's flat tigers and reclining nudes proposing a cardboard cutout of sensationalised terror, Ozias moves further depicting an enclosed pool of crocodiles decapitating a sunbathing onlooker. As with both artists and a generalised observation of naive art, it is the subconscious that is prioritised over the continuous.

The momentum surrounding the exhibition builds as you walk the room, looking into each rectangle like stills from a silent animation, their bold flat colours immediately entertain and then as your eye falls on the miniature details, intricately indicating that not all is as it seems.

Growing up in rural Brazil, a small town named Eugenópolis in Minas Gerais, he worked with his family as an agricultural labourer aged five, leaving the countryside and relocating to Rio de Janeiro at age twenty to be a Mason, before working as a station agent at the Federal Railway Network. Some decades later he is office-bound, working as an administrator due to health problems. It is here, exposed to stationery supplies for the first time that he begins to draw, papering his office walls with caricatures of his colleagues. He is then commissioned by his employers to illustrate a book of Amazon wood species, published in 1981 - and for the first time, Ozias is presented as an artist. The origins of a diagrammatic style created with the tools of a conceptual thinker continue to be employed throughout his career. Found and foraged implements are favoured over traditional art supplies, Formica offcuts form his canvases and industrial gloss his pallet. While the techniques employed as an agricultural labourer and industrial mason possibly influenced the construction of his paintings, where a scene is formulated like a stage set of layers, scenery and players perfectly placed for the gaze of the best seat in the house.

The paintings on show (1996-2004) are from the period the artist was also an Evangelical Minister in the Pentecostal Assembly of God - a context that seems irresistible to connect to a prolific outpouring of works that often frame a central figure, a compositional structure like the altered pieces of an altarpiece.

The artist's introspective searching and questioning is palpably strong when considering the thought that some of his evangelical community rejected his artistic practice with a religion marked by rigorous traditionalism and fundamentalism - opposing the visual depiction of any living beings or religious figures. Knowing this makes the life of Ozias even more fascinating. - The creation of 400 known artworks before death and to iterate without repeating nor edition - all consistent and self-managed as if responding to a private brief removed from sales, concept or fame rather a meditative state of prayer. 

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias, Ala das baianinhas, 2001, Oil on hardwood board, © Danielian Galeria, Courtesy Danielian Galeria and David Zwirner.

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias - David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London - 1-29 September 2023.

Special thanks: Sara Chan and James Green.