Do Jardim, um Oceano (From the Garden, an Ocean) is the fruit of Panmela Castro’s most recent artistic residency in Lisbon. Following an invitation from Francisco Fino Gallery, the Brazilian visual artist spent two months leading a series of gatherings in her studio, individually captured in a collection of 16 new pieces. In effect, they are large portraits: images reflecting part of Panmela’s emotional mesh woven from her visit to Portugal, but with many different places, cultures and histories. Curated by Igor Simões, her monographic exhibition is almost like a group show – not only because of how close we are to the figures we recognise on canvas (and between the Portuguese cobbled streets), but above all for the warm presence of the people featured there. In Panmela’s garden, they are the ones who hold the painting’s reins.

This sort of subjective autonomy enshrined in each image is precisely the centrepiece of her portraiture work, a practice that the Rio-born artist has been pursuing since at least 2019. Admittedly, Panmela’s authorial approach is often evident. Some of her distinctive marks are echoed in Do Jardim, um Oceano – the influences of graffiti and muralism, the lines crumbling and dripping like weeping bodies, the expressionist brushstrokes and colours – but there is something unique about each new face offered to the artist and the audience. In the exhibition Retratos Relatos (2021, Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro), curated by Keyna Eleison – an event that cemented Panmela’s reputation as a portraitist -, the images apparently serve a greater purpose: to narrate the skins and grooves of biographies that, taken as such, can only be one of a kind.

Nevertheless, eternalising them in paint is also a way of turning them into symbols – badges for trans-feminist and anti-racist struggles, in which Panmela is an active spokesperson. In 2010, the artist established Rede Nami, to put an end to violence against women and encourage their participation in the arts, an activist effort that has already earned her the North American Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards. Her portraits deal, then, with the threshold between radical personalism and the development of a new collective iconography, favouring the perspective of friends and colleagues who, alongside her and in her day-to-day life, inspire and make a difference.

Consequently, we must understand that representation is a key issue in Panmela’s practice. We would not have to go very far, naturally: right on entering the exhibition at Francisco Fino, her self-portrait beckons us to read the pieces on display under Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words in Can The Subaltern Speak. “Between patriarchy and imperialism, the female figure vanishes, not just into pure nothingness, but into a violent wavering which is the figuration of the ‘Third World woman’,” the Indian author writes, in a passage underlined by the epigraph contained in the book’s blurb. Now, on the one hand, we are dealing with representativeness: where are the subaltern bodies and their images? In which streets, walls, exhibition halls – and, ultimately, all the public spaces where life and history are written – can we find them? Secondly, we are discussing the act of re-presentation: in what ways can other narratives and abstractions be constructed and displayed? And by whose hands?

We know these questions are not new. Nonetheless, they are still relevant at a time when there is an urgent need to debate our ways of seeing, naming, remembering and even musealising. All at once, Panmela’s portraits interact with the memory of the city and the history of art, reverting the Portuguese “imperial eye” which, shrouded in colonialist notions between the African and Brazilian coasts (those of yesterday and the ones persisting today), catalogues and describes so as to exploit and monitor – be it the lands, the cultures or the black populations on both edges of the Atlantic. The reference to the garden – the background of her images and the starting point for the sea connection – is especially beautiful in this regard. It is a green survival ground that shelters a fragment of possible tropicality, where native and migrant species coexist and intersect, without distinction. Within this similarly threshold setting, something between the memory of an original nature and its viability in contemporary Western contexts, Panmela succeeds in transmuting the experience of the in-between – an unbridgeable frontier in which the “subaltern” person is stripped of belonging or agency – into a force field which is as resistant as it is plural, as vast as it is immediate.

At Galeria Francisco Fino, Dennis Correia, Yen Sung, Anastácia Costa, Deolinda Cardoso Costa, Alexandre Santos (Xando), Telmo Galeano (Tekilla), Kemberling Martinez, Pati Nakamura, Amina Bawa, Namalimba Coelho, Oseias Baltazar, Felicia Hunter, Juca da Cruz, Lola Bahjan and Panmela Castro take the word and the image – all part of this web that has been (and is being) forged across streets, gardens, oceans and generations.

The exhibition is open until September 14, 2024.