{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/why-paulo-pedro-leal-belongs-in-brazilian-art-history/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":128304,"slug":"why-paulo-pedro-leal-belongs-in-brazilian-art-history","title":"Why Paulo Pedro Leal Belongs in Brazilian Art History","excerpt":"Leal’s absence from the narrative is difficult to reconcile with the force of his paintings, enlivening knife-fights and bar-brawls with a remarkable formal sophistication","content":"\n

Leal’s absence from the narrative is difficult to reconcile with the force of his paintings, enlivening knife-fights and bar-brawls with a remarkable formal sophistication

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‘That’s fine,’ the art dealer Jean Boghici would reply when a collector expressed interest in buying a painting by Brazilian modernist Cícero Dias, ‘as long as you take a PPL as well.’ The anecdote, recalled in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition of Paulo Pedro Leal, is amusing on the surface. Yet it also reveals something of Leal’s peculiar place within twentieth-century Brazilian art: present enough to circulate through the market, absent enough to remain largely outside the narratives that organised Brazilian art history. 

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That absence is difficult to reconcile with the force of the paintings gathered here. Across scenes of knife fights, shipwrecks, religious ceremonies, domestic interiors and still lifes, Leal emerges as a painter acutely attentive to the social world around him. A voracious reader of the news, he regularly transformed journalistic stories into paintings. Newspaper clippings reproduced throughout the exhibition reveal a visual repertoire that changed little across decades: murders, police violence and public spectacles of suffering. 

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The machinery through which violence is converted into public entertainment appears remarkably stable: one only needs to turn on evening TV shows like Brasil Urgente to see there’s an appetite for penal populism and misery enjoyment. Yet Leal’s paintings never simply reproduce the sensationalism of the press. Rather, they interrogate it. In Briga de Bar (Bar Brawl, 1965), a chaotic melee unfolds across the foreground, limbs extending in every direction as knives and firearms circulate through a compressed architectural space. The painting’s most unsettling detail, however, lies elsewhere. In the upper right corner, partially concealed behind a counter, a group of women observes the carnage. Their faces register fear, fascination and amusement simultaneously. The ambiguity is chilling. A similar dynamic unfolds in Briga no Botequim (Tavern Brawl, 1965), in which bystanders encourage the conflict, raising weapons while carefully avoiding participation. Leal seems less interested in violence itself than in those witnesses or accomplices who consume it from a safe distance. 

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Paulo Pedro Leal, Título desconhecido, 1950-60. Courtesy Collection Rafael Moraes, São Paulo
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Throughout the exhibition, violence repeatedly appears as performance. Leal’s remarkable command of space reinforces this effect: sharp perspectival distortions, oblique architectural angles and labyrinthine interiors generate a sense of entrapment. His environments recall the precarious urban fabric produced by Rio de Janeiro’s uneven modernisation, whose successive waves of development displaced poor and predominantly Black populations ever further from the city centre. The paintings’ formal sophistication is inseparable from this social reality. 

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What distinguishes Leal, who identified as Nagô (a term for enslaved people from West Africa who spoke the Yoruba language), from many artists working under comparable social and economic conditions is that he rarely offers painting as refuge. There are no utopian alternatives here, no compensatory visions of escape. Even across depictions of celebration racial tensions remain visible: in Candomblé (1950s), which presents a vibrant Afro-Brazilian religious gathering, with participants identified by ceremonial clothing and the coloured guias, bead necklaces associated with different deities, or orixás, Leal treats religious practice as a structure of belonging and survival. Elsewhere, in Bacanal (Bacchanal, 1955), amid music, alcohol, flowers and nudity, elegantly dressed – and overwhelmingly white – guests arrive at a garden fête devoted to pleasure. The contrast between these scenes of worship and hedonism is unlikely to be accidental. Across the exhibition, race frequently functions as an organising principle, whether explicitly through conflict or more subtly through access to leisure, visibility and social mobility. 

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A revealing interview with painter Maxwell Alexandre, included in the catalogue, notes that, despite also being from Rio de Janeiro, Alexandre had never encountered Leal’s work before. Where, then, are the histories of Black painters working in Brazil during the twentieth century? Recent institutional interest in artists historically classified as ‘self-taught’ – such as Leal – is only beginning to correct such omissions within the canon, while opening up untapped estates, which dealers can control and exploit. Yet Leal’s canvases, many of which are signed, ‘Pintor Paulo Pedro Leal’, have been declaring him a painter all along.

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Paulo Pedro Leal: Tragic Suburb is on view at Pinacoteca de São Paulo through 8 November

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From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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