Nelo Teixeira Angola, b. 1975

Nelo Teixeira works across painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture and installation. Through his topics, choices of materials, inventions and style, his work shares strong similarities with Art Brut, Arte Povera and Fluxus with their spirit of playful simplicity and de-commoditization of art. Echoing Arman who laid the groundwork for the wide development in the post-war and contemporary arts of an aesthetic of the recycled, Teixeira compulsively gathers manufactured worthless items to assemble them into sculptures or wall-mounted compartmented “paintings”. Using all sorts of materials, found objects, fragments and trash such as cardboard, metal cans, plastic canisters, pipes, egg cartons, beer caps, nails and screws or electronic components, the artist composes compelling pieces and installations that interweave contemporaneity and globalisation with craftsmanship and traditional African aesthetics. Thus, not only does he transmute all those mundane objects and wastes salvaged from everyday life into new visual symbols and narratives, he also reinterprets, in his own manner, the ancient African masks, sculptures, fetishes and other ritual objects that compose the underlying visual and spiritual culture of many African countries.

The human face and body are recurrent motifs in Teixeira’s production. Sharing the rawness and the impulsive intuition of artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel and Jean-Michel Basquiat who mainly took their inspiration in traditional tribal objects from Africa, Oceania and North America, but also in European folk art and children’s drawings, the artist’s brut approach to figures favours typologies, hybridity and evocations rather than individual singularities, accuracy and precision. Their schematic and childlike renderings, brashly shapes, and disproportionate and irregular traits reveal a theatrical vein along with an obvious sense of humour. The colourful and energetic paintings, which combine bold lines, and geometric, abstract and figurative motifs are characterised by their gestural and expressive force.

Versatile, eclectic and prolific, Nelo Teixeira has exhibited his work since 2000 and was among the five artists selected for the Angolan Pavilion entitled “On Ways of Travelling” at the 2015 Venice Biennale. For this occasion, the artist displayed an installation composed of large-scale anthropomorphic sculptures consisting of a complex assemblage of painted wood, plastic, metal and junk materials.