“My mission is to exorcize history,” said Ayrson Heráclito, in a lecture given in 2016. Since the 1980s, Heráclito, an artist, professor and curator from Bahia, has been clarifying the misconceptions of the Eurocentric historical narrative and its biased and racist perspective. His interest in the Yoruba culture and its origins in Nigeria, as well as the way it reinvented itself in the face of the colonial trauma of slavery in Brazil, demands another system of thought and other forms of aesthetic reading that are not filtered through the Westernized references which are established among us. In the artistic field, the canonical concepts of art history, such as the dichotomy between the figurative and the abstract, for example, become, at the very least, inadequate when it comes to understanding the symbolic universe of the Yoruba. For Heráclito, decolonizing – or rather exorcizing – knowledge means freeing oneself from the influence of a Western thought model and rewriting history on the basis of other assumptions.

In this way, Heráclito’s approach to Yoruba culture does not follow the conventional paths adopted by most Africa scholars. He does not resort to traditional ethnographic field notebooks, which often consist of distant observations, frequently layered by an exoticizing or stereotyped viewpoint, especially when it comes to essentialist approaches. Besides, he does not align himself with a significant amount of art historians, who tend to conceive of traditional African cultures as permanently archaic and immutable. He does not, therefore, work with the generic categories of “primitive” or “tribal” peoples from a timeless and isolated African continent so prevalent in the vast Eurocentric literature of art.

Heráclito’s immersion in the Yoruba universe initially passes through his experience of the Jeje Mahi nation’s Candomblé in Bahia. Acting as both an ogã sojatin [a practitioner with a specific role in the ceremonies] and an artist, he weaves together a series of strategies and creates for himself a range of ethical and aesthetic principles. This includes his commitment not to disclose the secret rituals of his religion, in contrast, for example, with the systematic approach of ethnologist photographer Pierre Verger, of whom Heráclito is a severe critic. When dealing with the pantheon of orixás [Yoruba deities] worshiped in Bahia, the challenges of the artist and the ogã in the visual field are, on one hand, escaping the literality and mere illustration of religious images while, on the other, opposing the distancing implied by a merely documentary record. His artistic practice is intertwined with his spiritual life, resulting in a work impregnated with conceptual metaphors that emerge from the ritualistic and mythological world of the candomblés.

This fusion between the real and the mythical is essential to an understanding of Heráclito’s visual proposition, which consistently succeeds in amalgamating art and healing, art and offerings, art and expurgation. An example of this practice is Bori (2008-11), a work that transcends mere artistic performance by incorporating elements of a sacred ritual. To the sound of ritual atabaques and chants, 12 performers represent the orixás do xirê, lying on straw mats while their heads are adorned with a variety of food/offerings. In the photographic series derived from this performance, it is possible to contemplate the continuity of the sacredness in the action.

Among the most important references to the Yoruba culture in Heráclito’s research are the aesthetic criteria described by the American historian Robert Farris Thompson. In his field research conducted in a number of Nigerian cities and villages, Thompson interviewed 88 people who declared themselves as able to examine Yoruba art from a critical perspective, including informants, rural workers, heads of villages and traditional cults, community representatives, artists, merchants and public officials. The results of his survey were summarized in the article “Yoruba Art Criticism”, published in 1973. The idea was to use the vocabulary and notions learned in the interviews to establish an aesthetic consensus about traditional sculptures based on the Yoruba perspective (although Thompson does not fail to use, in part, the European terminology of art history). If, in the history of canonical art of the 20th century, no one admitted there were aesthetic criteria shared between “the Africans”, whose essence would be tied to a “magical” and “primitive” world – the rational and critical thinking being something attributed only to the “West” –, Thompson’s work has shown the opposite.

According to American anthropologist Sally Price, in her essay “Others Art – Our Art” (1989), Thompson was one of the first Western researchers to highlight the dynamism of Yoruba art, “emphasizing the creative power of the artists.” Thompson would have described the “African critical acuity regarding the quality of the works,” whether they were produced for the cult or for marketing purposes. In the common view shared by European Africanists, a traditional artifact could only be considered “authentic” if it had been created and used for ritualistic purposes, disregarding the fact that many objects were made with the intention to sell after the Europeans colonized Africa. For Thompson, associative values, such as the magic-religion and aesthetic or even commercial sensitivity, did not exclude each other. The opposition between art and object of worship, in fact, is another binarism belonging to the history of Western canonical art, and we need to disentangle ourselves from it in order to better understand the universe of Ayrson Heráclito.

In his research, Thompson described 18 aesthetic criteria of Yoruba culture, summarized below:

1. Midpoint mimesis: the exact point midway between absolute similarity and absolute abstraction.

2. Disapproved hypermimesis: for the Yoruba, there can be something sinister in absolute mimesis, such as unpleasant truths (of ugliness, for example).

3. Excessive disapproved abstraction: the beautiful sculpture, for the Yoruba, is not very real, but also does not depart absolutely from the natural form.

4. Visibility: clarity in shape and line.

5. Bright softness: the taste for luminosity, which is characterized by polished surfaces and shadows in between incisions.

6. Emotional proportion: sculptural compositions inserted into a “social perspective”, in which the sculptor indicates antiquity or hierarchy by gradations of scale.

7. Appropriate positioning of body parts: a concept that overrides the notion of proportion.

8. Composition: the aesthetic spacing of things, or the positioning of individuals, things and animals are established by mimicry or emotional factors.

9. Delicacy: linear delicacy is a cause for admiration, but excessive delicacy or thinness in the representation of the human mass are condemned.

10. Roundness: carved contours and a fully spherical mass, not angular.

11. Protrusions: moderate protrusions are an accepted part of roundness.

12. Unpleasant protrusions: although not accepted among the Yoruba, the deliberate use of this effect occurs in satirical sculpture for the cult of the egunguns [any of the souls of the dead worshiped in the candomblé of Egungum].

13. Sinister protuberances: in general, rounded masses define Yoruba sculpture; however, excessively curved swellings do not.

14. Pleasant angularity: roundness is not an immutable law. A strong point of Yoruba aesthetics is its flexibility.

15. Straightness: this quality, next to roundness, is considered a geometric sign of essential character in fine sculpture. The Yoruba define straightness as an upright posture and, by extension, as balanced alignments and symmetry.

16. Symmetry: the reassuring virtues of symmetry are constant in Yoruba art.

17. Ability: appreciation of the artist’s rare ability.

18. Ephebism: an appreciation of youth.

We can analyze Heraclito’s photographic series in the light of the Yoruba criteria defined by Thompson. This requires us not to think exclusively on the basis of references from the history of Euro-American art, to which we are accustomed. In Banhistas [Bathers, 2007, pp. 1, 2, 3 and 8], the gaze of the spectator is sometimes on the defined body of the black man basted in palm oil, and sometimes on some abstraction caused by the proximity of the elements in the frame of the image. With a somewhat theoretical freedom (after all, they are quite different techniques and contexts), we can say that this image meets the first criterion described by Thompson, the “midpoint mimesis”. In any case, it is possible to have a glimpse of Heráclito’s search for a point equidistant between the figurative and the abstract.

We can also analyze Banhistas based on Thompson’s research: the images are shaped by the clarity of body and line shapes, while we perceive the shining softness conferred by the palm oil to the composition. The artist captures the young black man at angles that highlight the sinuous contours of his body. There is delicacy in the image. These criteria can also be observed in the series Sangue vegetal [Plant Blood, 2006]. In a close-up, we see the lap of a black man adorned with a necklace of dendê [oil palm] seeds. These yellow beads appear in other images of the series as piercings that delicately adorn the man’s head. Dendê, a key ingredient in the cuisine from Bahia, is also an ancestral element in the mythology of candomblé, in which palm oil is considered “vegetable blood”. Heráclito’s composition refers us emotionally to Afro-Bahian culture (and also meets the eighth criterion described by Thompson: the aesthetic spacing of individuals by mimicry or emotional factors).

The aesthetic dimension of objects can provide us with a means to understand the general structures of value, as well as the central metaphors of Yoruba society. If, among the aesthetic criteria, one of the main aspects is the search for the midpoint between figurative and abstract, this duality is not limited to form. We are also able to observe the search for coexistence between the real and the mythical, between the emphasis on physical materiality and the underlying symbolism. Careful with this question, the artist expresses his interest in the “intermediate” character of things, as in this quote in the text “Entre o sêmen e o dendê: aproximações do orixá exu na fotografia de Ayrson Heráclito” [Between Semen and Palm Oil: Approximations of the Orixá Exu in the Photography of Ayrson Heráclito, 2017], by Mateus André de Souza:

“I have always been interested in working with ‘intermediate’ materials, that is, matter in its raw state – matter for reflection; intermediaries, because they are in a constant state of transformation, by their physical or symbolic nature. [I have always been interested in] Materials that would promote a direct association with a particular theme and, at the same time, provoke a wider view of several other interpretations. I have realized that some materials could be interpreted in a hegemonic way by several local social groups, for example, the materials used in rituals and Afro-Bahian cuisine. Following the path outlined by [the German artist Joseph] Beuys, I want to achieve methexis – the concrete expression of an idea or spirituality. Palm oil is one of them. Simultaneously, I promote a decoding and a new way of absorbing its usual meaning.”

For Heráclito, the search for the “intermediary” implies adopting the Yoruba perspective also present in other aspects of life, such as in its relationship with time. If the Western idea of time is based on a linear connection between the past, present and future, in the Yoruba perspective this difference does not exist. The artist examines this theme in a series of films and photographs entitled Histórias do futuro [Stories of the Future, 2015]. The work is a counterpoint to Portuguese priest Antonio Vieira’s view in his eponymous book, published in 1718, which, based on prophecies, proposed the creation of a Portuguese empire that dominates the world. Heráclito appropriates this idea and subverts it, rescuing prophecies based on the pre-colonial thought system of reading the future through divination, by reading water (hydromancy), the fields (agromancy) and air (aeromancy).

The decolonization of the knowledge represented in his work goes beyond a mere rhetorical discourse; it is an effective practice which rescues and values other aesthetic criteria, other epistemologies and cosmologies. ///

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“Descender para transcender: descolonizando o conhecimento” [“Descend to Transcend: Decolonizing Knowledge”], lecture by Ayrson Heráclito at the AfroTranscendence event in São Paulo, October 27, 2016.

“Yoruba Art Criticism”, by Robert Farris, published in The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, by Morgan Perkins and Howard Morphy (Blackwell Pub., 2006).

CAPTIONS pp. 45-7: Piercing pérola [Piercing Pearl, 2005], from the series Sangue vegetal [Plant Blood]. pp. 48-9: From left to right, from top to bottom, Nanã, Iansã, Oxum, Xangô, Omulu, Ogum and Tempo, from the series Bori (2008-11). pp. 50-2: Corpo e sal: hidromancia, Baobá: agromancia e Atletas: aeromancia [Body and Salt: Hydromancy, Baobab: Agromancy and Athletes: Aeromancy], from the series Histórias do futuro [Stories of the Future]. p. 54: O banho de Òsún [Òsún’s Bath, 2020]; Òsún com abebê e ofá [Òsún With Abebê and Ofá, 2020]. p. 55: Logunedé com ofá e penas de pavão [Logunedé with Ofá and Peacock Feathers, 2020]; O pavão azul [The Blue Peacock, 2020]. pp. 58-9: Vodun Agbê I and II (2010).

Ayrson Heráclito (Macaúbas, Bahia, 1968) is Ogã do Jeje Mahi, artist, professor and curator, with a doctorate degree in communications and semiotics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) and a master’s degree in visual arts from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He held the exhibition Yorùbáiano (2021) at the Rio Art Museum and participated in the 35th São Paulo Biennial, in 2023.

Amanda Bonan (Niterói, RJ, 1981) is a doctoral student in art history at University of São Paulo (USP). She is a curator at the Rio Art Museum, where she organized the exhibitions Funk: um grito de liberdade e ousadia [Funk: A Cry of Freedom and Boldness, 2023], Um defeito de cor [A Color Defect, 2023], Crônicas cariocas [Rio Chronicles, 2021] and Yorùbáiano (2021).

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