The stars awaken a certain reverence
“I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find somethin more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape and especially in the distant one of the horizon, man beholds something as beautiful as his own nature.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836)
The 19th century transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in the unity of all creation. In embracing feeling, humanity, and nature, human beings would be able to decipher the mysteries of the grandest truths in the world. What can be found in the profundity of meditating a mountain silhouette? Or witnessing the humanless-ness of the Brazilian rainforests? Or even in passing admiration of the blooming wisteria flowers under Siena skies? In our everyday lives, we are confronted with fragments of the natural world that is so accessible, yet seemingly distant.
Angerami’s work explores the same unity that inspired the transcendentalists in every aspect of his practice: through subject matter, medium, research, and technique. In his various paintings and installation works, the division between man and nature has been blurred. In his practice, Angerami focuses on the idea of unity and wholeness. From his series Paisagem Viva (living landscape), he completes landscapes with burnt wood and paint. In this exercise, he uncovers the dependency between destruction and creation as well as space and time. In viewing one of these paintings, the viewer is acutely aware of the textual tensions between rough burnt wood and smooth white paint. One is reminded of how sunsets are followed by sunrises and how the ocean will always return to the shore—the circularity of life and the constancy of inconstancy.
In each of his works, Angerami’s acute sensibilities to smaller components constituting a cohesive image shine. In Territórios Existenciais (existential territories) he builds layers upon
layers of paint with differing translucencies to communicate skylines and natural phenomena. This is partially inspired by Renaissance and medieval Italian painting, in which artists had to expertly alter the opacities of their paint to adapt to the volatile properties of the medium. Angerami references artists like Raffaello Sanzio and other painters in the Renaissance who painted with lead white oil paint that had to be painted thinly in order to not make it flake or crack. As a result, artists would create an underpainting of white and build up layers and values in order to create an image, avoiding spots that they wanted to preserve the pure white. Similarly, Angerami’s bird and landscape paintings have been built up by layers that, in completion, communicate the layered nature of plumage and the effect of water rushing and breaking over itself.
As an artist who needs to work outside, Angerami believes that when one is in nature, they are in constant communication with their surroundings. They receive information through their skin, eyes, ears, and other senses. This sensorial experience, then, is channeled into Angerami’s paintings, and he finds a way to bring the viewer into the same setting: into a space that is familiar, even if it has never been experienced before. Rather than overwhelming the viewer, these paintings act as sanctuaries. Angerami’s paintings are quieting, offering a moment of repose and the tactility of the paint, the textures and free-nature of his strokes inspire a sense of awe and demand a status of sanctity. Angerami’s paintings offer a vignette into his involved experiences with nature and through a Renaissance-esque sensibility towards painting and a Brazilian embrace of nature, a viewer’s senses are sharpened to the unique existence as simultaneously a whole being and a part of a larger system of being.
In a post- (or mid-) pandemic world, we are no strangers to alienation and fragmentation. What we have lost most of all perhaps, is our connection to the outside world. As homes have become suffocating refuges from an invisible, but devastating, virus, humanity has furthered itself from its true origin. Although they are of the same genetic materials, humankind often sees itself at odds with nature and the ‘man versus nature’ narrative has become a familiar, albeit over-exaggerated, trope. But this dichotomy between man and nature is misplaced and because of it, humans have devastated the natural world; Burning rainforests, ocean oil spills, exploited and exhausted lands can only be attributed to our hands. Even within our own sector of humanity, people strive to create schisms between races, cultures, economic classes and any other instances of diversity. Humans seem obsessed with carving clean cuts between what is good and bad, right and wrong, ignorant of the fact, perhaps, that these labels are not universal truths. And maybe the only truths that we will ever be able to know are the ones that we can see, feel, smell, taste, and hear—the ones that are contingent on the awareness of our existence as part of a larger world.
Emerson wrote that “The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible...” But in witnessing Angerami’s work, perhaps he is wrong. The gold that Angerami employs in many of his paintings is, in itself, the essence of stars, as gold is one of the few metals on earth that comes from space. In the installation piece Arquipélago (archipelago), Angerami has salvaged concrete shards straight from abandoned buildings’ walls and reconstructed mountain ranges, drawing and painting on with ink and gold foil. From a distance, the gold effects gleam like stars in a night sky, but up close, one can see the delicate outlines of mountains and nature on the rough concrete surface. The destruction of a star is a new beginning for an artwork and Angerami has brought these stars to us. In viewing his artworks, we are witnesses to nature. So, just as day will turn to night and back into day again, destruction will birth new life, to eventually be destroyed once more.