VOX POPULI: SOLO SHOW BY NELO TEIXEIRA

8 February - 17 April 2025

Overview

The exhibition Vox Populi constitutes a monumental intervention that formalizes and problematizes the singular universe of Nelo Teixeira—one of the most distinctive figures in the landscape of contemporary Angolan art. Bringing together an unprecedented collection of around 20 works that, in terms of language, traverse the boundaries between self-taught naïve art, Art Brut, and sociopolitical narrative, the project traces a critical cartography of the human and social condition in Angola, rooted in the dialogue between precariousness, resistance, resilience, and memory.

The concept of vox populi, understood here as the resonance of the collective voice, emerges in Nelo Teixeira's practice through the graphic incorporation of vernacular expressions that simultaneously serve as denunciation and enunciation, poetic and political outcries.

Phrases that transcend language to inscribe themselves as performative acts. These expressions, often integrated into supports made from discarded materials or found objects—cans, paper, magazines and newspapers, fabrics, whisky packages, scrap metal, discarded industrial paints, fragments resulting from the demolition of Luanda’s favelas—become signs of a visual lexicon that tensions the contradictions of a society marked by inequality, hunger, and the devastation perpetrated by the logic of contemporary consumer society.

In Nelo Teixeira’s installation practice, drawers, wooden boxes, and other architectural fragments emerge as powerful metaphors of shelter and displacement, construction and ruin. These forms, on the one hand, evoke the informal architecture of peripheral communities; on the other, they retrieve the artist's experience in stage design, establishing an inherent theatricality that positions the viewer as a co-actor in the social drama being enacted. The objects, remnants of a system that implodes both materially and socially, become testimonies to the fragility of the urban and human fabric, while simultaneously offering a platform for resistance, reconfiguration, and collective creation.

Thus, Vox Populi is articulated as an embodied polis: a space where the material, the vernacular, and the symbolic converge to give voice to a nation.
Here, the artist’s gesture transcends the aesthetic to assert itself as a political act, urging the public to listen, participate, and reconstruct, within the ruins, the foundations of a new social possibility.

In this context, Nelo Teixeira’s work finds profound resonances with both Art Brut and the Fluxus movement, establishing dialogues between the visceral authenticity of the creative act and the subversion of conventional artistic boundaries. Just as Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut principles reject institutionalized norms, Nelo Teixeira’s practice is rooted in spontaneous expression, the potency of instinct, and the use of found materials that carry within them the memory of exclusion and waste. Simultaneously, his ability to transform these remnants into collective narratives, through performative actions and installations, aligns with the ethos of Fluxus, which conceived art as a participatory event integrated into everyday life. Thus, Teixeira’s work not only translates but expands these traditions, situating them within the Angolan context of precariousness and resilience, where artistic action merges with the urgency of reimagining the social fabric.

Furthermore, Nelo Teixeira’s work maintains a strong connection with the realms of visual and sound poetry, asserting itself as a hybrid manifestation that transcends materiality to reach the dimension of the word and rhythm. The vernacular expressions that repeatedly permeate his work—such as "povo +", "povo, povo, fala povo popular", "Liberdade", "mais pão com Best", "fala + povo", "Kid"—operate as poetic utterances of immense symbolic weight, configuring a visual language in which words not only communicate but cry out, denounce, and summon. This performative nature of inscriptions finds echoes in concrete and sound poetry, transforming the repetition of words, phrases, and graphic forms into rhythmic pulsations that reverberate through the fragments and spaces of the installation. Thus, Nelo Teixeira’s aesthetic vocabulary assumes the power of a collective outcry, where sound, word, and matter intertwine in a profoundly political and sensorial weave.

CATALOGUE

Works