Calma – Stephan Doitschinoff
I remember coming across a book one day in a book store. Its bright blue cover instantly caught my eye, particularly when I saw that it was adorned with a gold embossed Aztec looking skull, with the word CRAS written underneath. I couldn’t help but open it up, and see what was contained inside.
And that was how I first came across the work of Stephan Doitschinoff, or Calma, as he is known in his local town of Sao Paolo. The Brazilian born artist was raised as the son of an evangelical minister, subject to Christian fundamentalism throughout his childhood, and raised on the difficult streets of Sao Paolo, where he was exposed to the constant hardships imposed by the military dictatorship at the time, and the corruption and chaos that ensued.
These factors combined to infuse his work with an amazing array of dichotomies: contrasting religious symbolism with pagan lewdness, Western spiritualism with local Macumba folklore, and thoughts on the nature of belief with what the human condition entails. Flipping through the book, and looking at his artwork, I was assaulted by an array of these symbols from churches burning, to skeletons crying to more traditional religious symbols of lambs, crosses and latin phrases. I found it the pure abundance of different components to his paintings truly amazing, and felt that I could really look at them for hours, pouring over each of the different intricate layers of his works.
It seemed to me that Doitschinoff provided the perfect analogy for the dynamic nature of modern Brazil. Pinned between the increasing influence of developed nations and the need to assert itself itself as a country in its own right, Brazil will inevitably face some fundamental changes in the years to come. And I think that Doitschinoff is facing the same questions that his country is: What is belief and spirituality? What does it mean to be an individual?
He recognises that these can never be completely answered, but he also recognises of reconciling these questions with himself.
In the end, I bought the book. Hopefully, one day I will be able to buy his artwork as well.
les BAMF 