Author Description

"Dalton Paula: O sequestrador de almas" (Dalton Paula: The Soul Kidnapper) presents works by the plastic artist, accompanied by a critical reflection on a production that, centered on the black body, makes a reading of the Afro-ascendant religious matrix and the African diaspora in the formation of the country. With a text written in four hands by Dalton Paula and anthropologist and historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, the book sheds light on the work of this visual interpreter from Brazil who is an exponent of a generation that has been rethinking art in a country whose history and imagination are still predominantly European and colonial. The volume presents the research -travels, conversations, photographs, collages, diaries- carried out by the artist for the elaboration of works created in formats as diverse as painting, drawing, installations, performances, videos, photographic series and objects. As an "archaeologist of things," Dalton Paula looks for traces and layers of these that are often interrupted or invisible stories. The result "is a gallery of ghosts of intimacy, who have never been so alive. A dive into the time of the ancestors, their wanderings, and wisdoms, which remained as an uncomfortable 'present absence' in the objects that come to life in the infusing space that is the territory of relationships and memory itself," writes Lilia Schwarcz.