Antonio Maia: Magical Symbols

Antonio Maia: Spiritual Reenchantment

        Lucas Dilacerda

Antonio Maia was born in 1928 in Carmópolis, a small town in the countryside of Sergipe, in Northeastern Brazil. During his childhood in the rural area, the artist was deeply influenced by popular religiosity which later reemerged as a subject of interest in his research on spiritual practices particularly through ex-votos and tarot. A self-taught painter, Maia studied various media including ceramics, photography, drawing, engraving and more, but it was in painting that he found fertile ground for developing his poetics—an approach that weaves together imagery of popular religiosity with the esotericism of tarot and the magic of occult sciences. By blending Northeastern visual culture with modernist trends, he has developed a unique and authentic style within the Brazilian art scene.

Antonio Maia's body of work unfolds in three distinct phases: 1) Informal Abstractionism 2) ex-votos, and 3) tarot. The first one was developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is defined by Informal Abstractionism, which leads the artist to explore matter painting using earthy tones often associated by southeastern art criticism with the landscapes of Northeastern Brazil. In 1964, as the New Figuration movement in Brazil consolidated—emerging as a reaction to geometric abstraction and concretism—Antonio Maia entered the second phase of his career, marked by the northeastern ex-votos. This period became the best-known of his trajectory and played a crucial role in securing his place in both national and international art scenes. During his third phase, beginning in 1986, the artist undertook extensive research into tarot for over a decade, ultimately producing several distinct versions of the 22 Major Arcana cards.

The exhibition Antonio Maia: Magical Symbols presents works from the artist's third phase bringing into dialogue themes such as spirituality, the unconscious, esotericism and popular religiosity. These phases, however, are neither self-contained nor static: they share a strong aesthetic connection with one another and have built up a visual repertoire that has continuously changed over time. In this sense, the abstractionism of the first phase—initially informal—gradually takes on formal and organic aspects expressed in geometric backgrounds of flat colors, while the figuration of ex-votos during the second phase has become the pictorial foundation for the development of Maia’s tarot iconography.

Ex-votos

An ex-voto is an object offered by a devotee to a saint or deity as an expression of gratitude for a granted grace, such as healing from an illness or the fulfillment of a wish. In this sense, the ex-voto stands as a kept promise. The term originates from the Latin phrase ex voto suscepto, meaning “in fulfillment of a vow (promise).” A devotee is someone who practices faith in honor of a saint or deity, entailing belief, commitment, and religious practice. They not only hold a belief but also act upon their faith through prayers, vows, pilgrimages and offerings.

The ex-voto, in turn, is not merely a material object but also a spiritual practice. It goes beyond the materiality of the object, expanding into the immateriality of faith. It is an artistic and vernacular manifestation usually crafted in wood—an ancestral materiality essential for xylography—in which parts of the human body, such as the head, hand, arm, foot, and heart, are sculpted.

In addition to wooden objects, the ex-voto can take the form of a photograph, painting, clothing, document, personal item, and much more. This diversity stems from the fact that an ex-voto is, above all, a sign—an index pointing to something outside itself. That is why the sculpture of a head, as a sign of the devotee's body, establishes within the ex-voto a connection between the material and spiritual bodies.

Antonio Maia's painting transforms the ex-voto into a sign—a bridge between heaven and earth—which explains his obsession with heads. In many religions the head is seen as the point of connection between the human and the divine (or more-than-human). Within folk Catholicism, the head is regarded as the seat of faith connecting us to God. In African-rooted religions (Candomblé, Umbanda, and others), the head (orí) serves as the primary channel for communication with the Orishas. For this reason, the head plays a fundamental role in various Catholic, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous ceremonies, celebrations and rites. In these contexts, the mask emerges as a spiritual technology that removes the human face from the head, aiming to induce trance states and facilitate access to spiritual realms.

Tarot

From 1986 onward, Antonio Maia developed his research on tarot, which culminated in a painted reinterpretation of the 22 Major Arcana cards. Tarot is an ancient divinatory tradition rooted in Hebrew culture that assists in interpreting the events of our lives. In this sense, tarot is not a premonition of the future but rather an oracle—a means of seeking spiritual guidance during times of doubt and uncertainty. It is less about fortune-telling and more about mindful interpretation—capturing virtualities (latent potentialities) within our historical context and helping us think critically and make decisions in the present to shape the future.

The tarot is a deck of 78 cards divided into two groups: 56 Minor Arcana and 22 Major Arcana. The term “arcana” originates from the Latin arcanum, meaning “secret,” “mystery,” or “enigma.” In this sense, each card points to certain unknown or seldom-explored aspects of our lives. Opening the tarot, then, means revealing parts of our lives we are not fully aware of by bringing hidden aspects to light, making them perceptible and allowing us to recognize and learn from them.

The 56 Minor Arcana point to everyday facets of our lives—work, love, family, friendship, emotions, finances, and daily actions. They are divided into four suits (groups), each symbolizing one of the four elements: 1) Cups symbolize water and relate to emotions and subjectivity; 2) Wands symbolize fire and represent vital energy, desire, willpower, and action; 3) Swords symbolize air and relate to the mental realm, rationality, thought, and communication; and 4) Pentacles symbolize earth and represent the material world, finances, labor, home, and health.

The 22 Major Arcana cards point to pivotal moments in an individual's journey: changing careers, falling in love, undergoing drastic transformations, discovering one's true self, and so on. They are considerably more reflective in addressing deeper and more universal themes. While the 56 Minor Arcana represent the four classical elements, the 22 Major Arcana represent the fifth: ether, an immaterial element arising from the material union of water, fire, air, and earth.

As the Minor Arcana are linked to consciousness, the Major Arcana are associated with the unconscious—both engaging with the archetypes that constitute our subjectivity. For this reason, readings of the Minor Arcana tend to be more practical in nature, whereas those of the Major Arcana take on a more introspective, almost clinical approach. Each Major Arcana card depicts an image that reveals a landscape drawn from the geography of the unconscious.

The Major Arcana cards are composed of three elements: a number, an image, and a word. The number—typically placed at the top, in the sky of the card—ranges from 0 to 21 and is closed tied to tarot numerology, which arranges the sequence of the cards like chapters in a story. The image—centered on the card—depicts a scene made up of characters and elements that poetically convey different states of mind drawn from the unconscious. The word—usually located at the bottom, in the earth of the card—names the image and can carry different meanings depending on how it is translated. For example, the card known as “The Fool” may also be called “The Jester,” “The Clown,” “The Wanderer,” and so on.

Tarot is an iconography of the unconscious—a visual repertoire shaped by artistic experimentation that seeks to create images of the most unfathomable experiences of existence. Antonio Maia engenders his own tarot iconography and, therefore, his own mythology of unconscious archetypes. Like painting, tarot offers an alternative way of knowing that escapes the normative frameworks of modern science. It is a kind of magical thinking aimed at translating humanity’s most archaic emotions.

Whether tarot is true or false misses the point; what matters is how it provides us with an experience of self-reflection on both personal and collective life. When we take a skeptical and pragmatic approach to tarot we come to see it as a system that maps out the fundamental elements of our existence—love, work, nature, and so on—dividing them into cards. But that does not change the fact that when we draw a card at random—left to the whims of chance—tarot gives us a moment to look deeper and reflect on hidden parts of our existence. As such, we can turn to it again and again, each time focusing on areas we might be overlooking. That is why tarot is a call to life.

Northeastern Surrealism and Semiotic Symbolism

A head floats on the horizon. It is this surreal northeastern atmosphere that permeates Antonio Maia’s paintings. On one hand, there is his surrealist captivation with the unconscious and everything that goes beyond the limits of reason: dreams, delirium, faith, magic, mysticism. On the other, his fascination with the magical realism of Northeastern Brazil and its rich local culture that constantly strives to cultivate the reenchantment of life.

If his works blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, it is to transcend the realms of matter and reach toward the specters of the spirit. That is why every element in his painting is a sign—hypermedia that connects earth and sky, the conscious and the unconscious, reason and dream, saints and archangels.

In his paintings a wide variety of signs can be found. Typically, in the lower left corner of the canvas, zodiac signs (Taurus, Gemini, Virgo, Libra, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, etc.) appear alongside planetary signs (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Uranus, and Pluto) as well as alchemical and numerological signs. In the lower right corner, letters from the Hebrew alphabet can be seen.

Within the space of Antonio Maia’s painting figure and symbol share the same ontology—they are signs of reconnection pointing toward multiverses parallel to our existence. The selection of these signs may suggest the composition of Antonio Maia’s astrological chart and the way he reflects on and interprets the unconscious.

Pop Art and Vernacular Art

Frederico Morais once remarked that Antonio Maia was likely the first artist in Brazil to establish a meaningful connection between the “pop” and the “popular” (in the sense of “vernacular”). On one hand, there is his “pop” inclination toward vibrant colors and the ordinary elements of everyday life; on the other, his engagement with vernacular culture as an inexhaustible source of artistic creation.

Historically, while pop art has been associated with modern and contemporary avant-garde artistic movements, vernacular art has often been dismissed as primitive, naïve, or second-rate. This hierarchy of value between these two modes of artistic expression reflects aesthetic racism, where labels like “folk art” are frequently used to marginalize artistic production originating from Northeastern Brazil—confining it in “local” and “regional” categories to elevate and legitimize artistic output from the Rio-São Paulo axis as "national".

Antonio Maia deconstructs the binaries of Brazilian aesthetic racism by making his painting a synthesis of modern, vernacular, and contemporary elements. In his work, frontal and profile figures emerge against organic and geometric backgrounds rendered in flat colors. His paintings display an economy of form and a simplification of space—free from perspective or shadow. Drawings outlining figures recall the strokes of Northeastern xylography. Colors filling the space create harmony and lend weight to the manifestation of bodies. The predominance of blue—a color charged with spiritual meaning in various religions and responsible for reconnecting us to gods and Orishas—offers a parallel to our unconscious and exerts a pull toward the inner depths of subjectivity. Warm colors, especially brown and orange, by contrast, materialize forms projecting them outward into the world. Sacred geometry translates a fractal thinking in which every micro-existence reflects a macro-cosmos.

Spiritual Reenchantement

César Romero says that Antonio Maia had a collection of 50 radios, each tuned to a different frequency. He would turn them all on simultaneously, generating a polyphony of sounds and vibrations that evoked an aesthetic, religious, and mystical feeling.

In an era marked by climate change, modern science has failed to offer viable solutions to the ecological crisis. Moreover, we suffer from a profound stultification of the imagination that leaves us unable to envision paths beyond the suffocating limits of the possible. Amid this atmosphere of crisis, doubt, and uncertainty, tarot reveals pathways once unimaginable to Western rationality. Thus, it becomes urgent and necessary to open ourselves up to hearing more-than-human voices, that is, other spectra and agencies of thought that allow for a spiritual reenchantment with the magic embedded in reality. It is this very force of reenchantment with the world that we find in each of Antonio Maia’s ex-voto and tarot paintings.

Lucas Dilacerda is a curator and art critic, and a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics.