Tropical Darkzera

Tropical Darkzera is the concept that tightly embraces all of Malfeitona’s artistic fronts. It is the non-obvious tropical, beautiful, brave, complex, dark and aggressive. With a family from the Recôncavo and interior of Bahia, the artist born and raised in Salvador combines the “dark” aesthetic with the tropical. The concepts seem opposite, but they complement each other to reinvent the national imagery of Bahia, Brazil and Latin America with originality, detail, contrast and humor.

Cacti adorn themselves with thorns, just like punks. The same hot, nervous sun that lights up the tourists’ vacations on the beach also shines on the workers who carry weight and wait for the bus. The tall coconut trees, with their sharp-edged leaves and roots that look like venous capillaries, stand proudly against the wind and the sea. Carnival is more intense than any metal festival. The mangrove swamp, with its black mud and intertwined roots, is home to small, slimy, curly monsters with long eyes and claws that pinch. While mosquitoes are the true vampires that suck human blood, bats fly at night attacking mangoes, cashews, flowers, seeds and insects, being one of the main responsible for the maintenance of tropical biomes.

Under the concept of tropical darkzera, Malfeitona mixes the beautiful with the aggressive, presents social criticism with humor and light themes with excessive prolixity. Criticizing artistic perfectionism and academic norms, Malfeitona uses bright, solid colors to represent dark creatures and a lot of black to “darzeira” stereotypically cheerful scenarios, thus creating expressive and original works. Malfeitona is inspired by the aesthetics of the 90s and 2000s, Brazilian comics and Japanese mangas, street art and visual communication, and the constant art factory that is Salvador. It is inspired by Caribé, Jorge Amado, Nação Zumbi, J. Borges, Calasans Neto, Turma da Mônica, Cavaleiros do Zodíaco, Dragon Ball, Nana, Black Metal, Punk Rock, decorated dishcloths, neighborhood school walls, neighborhood printing signs with lots of low-quality photos and words in comic sans, the typography of fairs and boats, the Latin Catholic aesthetic, the peba products, and the “armengues” (makeshift arrangements). Baroque, an artistic style very present in Salvador’s colonial architecture, is marked by exuberance, richness of detail, satire, and, mainly, the contrast of the union between light and shadow. In her art, Malfeitona also explores contrast, as this is how she sees her hometown, where the beauty and ugliness of reality go hand in hand. Salvador breathes art, but it is also one of the capitals with the largest number of informal workers in Brazil. The opulence of the churches and mansions contrast with the poverty of a large part of the population, just as the joy of street parties goes hand in hand with violence.

In Malfeitona’s work, these aesthetic characteristics also appear in a dark way, marked by both the influences of rock and the scenery and heat of Bahia, where the sun is “angry” and the crab is cute. Malfeitona creates illustrations with simple lines, but full of details, representing deep issues such as religious syncretism with humor, paradisiacal beaches coexisting with dark mangroves and abusing the figure of the bat and the mangrove, maximum symbols of tropical darkness.

The creative method is also tropical darkzera – many of Malfeitona’s artistic decisions and influences were influenced by limited resources or training. Having grown up in the same house and neighborhood as his family, he saw his grandparents and uncles earn their living as freelancers, with small businesses in the neighborhood. He also watched the women in the family customize clothes, dish towels and create art that decorated the houses. Malfeitona observes the street as a museum, appreciating the street artists, the walls of children’s schools painted with famous characters whose proportions are distorted by the finishing of the walls and learning from the marketing strategy of street vendors and family market vendors. He saw his fellow countrymen taking on multiple tasks on their own with great creativity. Later, he came into contact with the punk movement and the “Do It Yourself” (DIY) concept, and combining the two references, he adopted the “get your hands dirty and do it” approach. Malfeitona does not romanticize and deeply desires that everyone has access to resources and education to achieve what they want, but in the absence of these, she greatly values doing what one can with what one has, the peba and the armengues (gambiarras) that are, for her, creative, technological and wonderful adaptations.