The journey of a visual artist is an ever evolving dynamic to envision a means to express an aesthetic experience that connects to the larger world in personal, meaningful and authentic ways. Aislan Pankararu is a Pankararu artist whose worldview is formally shaped by the culture of his Indigenous Brazilian heritage. Beyond the academics of a typical Beaux Arts training, Aislan studied to become a medical physician while creating drawings and paintings in his youth. Through the structured complexity of learning processes to understand how the body functions, he used that knowledge to align it with the spiritual and cosmological world of the Pankararu Nation. The Endless River series of acrylic, natural pigment and permanent markers on canvas and paper, is an empowered embodiment and expression of “this thing” he was seeking to express that fuses traditional knowledge of the Pankararu world that embraced him, with the scientific world of his professional achievements. Endless River becomes a powerful series of revelatory abstractions that celebrate Aislan’s journey that channeled his energies to assert, I am an artist…it is the way I can manifest my instinctive being.

 

The Toré is a ritual dance within Pankararu culture, that is the fundamental connection between earthly and spiritual worlds. This is a sacred divine practice that is expressed and practiced through the dynamics of creating pathways of connectivity through dance, movement, music and body painting as experienced in Aislan’s life. The sensionitics - sensory experiences of a total artistic experience - is crucial to the infrastructure of Aislan’s aesthetic sensibilities and practice of Pankararu traditions. Artistic expression to Aislan, is also a means to create visual systems that heal and soothe individuals in times and spaces of need to provide comfort, help and or support. Small panel abstractions in the Sem Titulo series, executed on unprimed canvas with natural pigment, record cosmological and geographical signs and symbols, are reminiscent of the body painting critical to each participant in the ritual Toré. In the same series, panels of abstracted organic-like seed pods, small flowers, or particles reference molecular structures found throughout the terrains of this earthly world. Similarities in his creative processes can also be seen in the dreams and landscapes creations of Aboriginal artists in Australia who also have complex beliefs and connections between the earthly and spiritual world. 

 

The aesthetics of Aislan’s worldview embrace a flow and harmony in the vastness of his memories that find endless freedom, to create through the medium and process of painting, expressed in the large scale panoramic, undulating swirls and waves of the waters in Rio Pankararu. Color, texture and patterns play a distinctive role in defining, expressing and documenting the attributes of Aislan’s Pankararu heritage. These elements are sourced through his acute observation and passion of plant life that are often catalysts for his compositional studies. Cactus plants and flowers are prolific throughout Aislan’s abstractly expressive works. Plant imagery and organic life forms reference traditional medicinal pharmacopeia of Indigenous healing practices, and these artistic interrelationships are combined with scientific knowledge, to create images that heal the mind, body and spirit. Aislan Pankararu’s mission is committed to not only healing and artistry, but to “the revindication for space, reconnecting with a place that was seized since colonization…it is a way to bring a new vision…” 

 

The vision of Aislan Parakararu’s artistry is about the tenacity of resilience, resistance, reclamation and the necessity of identity, agency, dignity and the distinctiveness of the innate beauty of Indigenous cultures. In this era of global crisis and challenges of climate change, Indigenous wisdom is crucial to understanding ways to honor and protect the environment and life forms on this Earth.  Aislan artistry addresses the necessity to document Indigenous visual systems, in new - yet, rooted in ancestral legacies in ways of seeing, learning, knowing and evolving to give visibility to Indigenous artistries, philosophies and histories in an art world filled with endless possibilities to evolve.

 

Leslie King Hammond,PhD

Professor Emerita

Maryland Institute College of Art