On the second floor of a building in São Paulo suffused with sounds of the city and fumes from an auto shop below, Aislan Pankararu’s studio teems with reminders of his rural home in the sertão nordestino, Brazil’s northeastern hinterland. Leather hides sent by his father hang from the ceiling beside a bundled mass of dried croá stalks. Large paintings lean against the walls, marked by evocative abstractions and undulating lines that suggest subterranean networks of roots. Dots and plus signs in other works look like energy fields that radiate from nucleic cores (or “cellular universes,” as Pankararu called them during my visit).
Since moving to the city in 2021, Pankararu has maintained a dialogue with his more remote homeland through a practice that pulls from his studies in medicine, references to the flora and fauna of Brazil’s interior, and the charged ritual drawings of his people, the Indigenous Pankararu. (He adopted his surname to proudly acknowledge “an ancestral legacy that must be well cared for,” he said.)
Licensed as a physician after years of study in Brasília, Pankararu returned to his childhood love of drawing while completing his medical residency in 2019. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of Covid-19, he opened an exhibition of drawings at the Hospital Universitário de Brasília, where he worked. By the end of 2021, Pankararu had appeared in 10 more shows, and he has since participated in exhibitions at the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília and Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Last year, he received the prestigious PIPA Prize, which celebrates emerging Brazilian talent.
Pankararu’s subdued color palette evokes northeastern Brazil’s Caatinga biome, where dry shrubs and thorny trees are gestural marks against the sepia tones of sandy earth. The environment is deeply entwined with Pankararu culture. “There is no Pankararu calendar without the Caatinga,” the artist said of his people’s relationship with the seasonal cycles of different plants.
Aislan Pankararu: Direction of Healing, 2024.
Courtesy Aislan Pankararu
In a series of works titled “Soil” (2024), painted in clay-pigmented acrylic, Pankararu blurs micro- and macroscopic views while evoking cell membranes, wave forms, arboreal growth rings, and topographic maps. In his “Touch” series (2024), white and black dots vibrate over planes that peel from raw linen to reveal a russet-painted ground. Other works like A Redescoberta (The Rediscovery, 2024) burst with energetic colors such as fuchsia, violet, and green—not unlike a landscape springing to life after summer rains.
Pankararu’s technique of painting with clay also alludes to the Toré, a ceremonial dance for which performers’ bodies are covered in emblematic designs. Painting his canvases as he might a dancer’s skin, he evokes a feeling of movement and aligns his work with sacred ritual—but more suggestively than directly, so as to maintain a sense of secrecy essential to Pankararu tradition. “There is a mystery called silence,” he told me, “and I will walk hand in hand with it.”
