O Bastardo

Born in 1997, O Bastardo was raised in Mesquita, municipality of Baixada Fluminense, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Working initially using urban languages such as graffiti, the artist elaborates a direct dialogue between autobiographical issues and pictorial thought, a conquest developed between family experiences and art schools such as EAV Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro and currently Beaux-Arts de Paris.
In recent paintings, the issues held in the works lead us to cross between everyday practices of empowerment of black people and usual gestures of belonging to social groups, such as asking for blessing or bleaching hair. In the portrait scenes, in series such as Pretos de grife and Só Lazer, consumerism, leisure and vanity are some of the identifications exhibited by groups that are supposedly absent from this type of representation.
Leisure and consumerism are increasingly recurrent subjects in works by racialized artists, as history has highlighted the gestures of violence and survival as a means of insertion and denouncement of the atrocities perpetrated against the majority of Brazilian population. O Bastardo [The Bastard] makes of his own name, preceded by the definite article, a link of subversion of his own history, maintaining the classificatory word that, in art scenes, starts to redirect the subject and alert to the practice of exoticizing the margins.