Adriel Santos and the Masculinities of the Sertao
Origins
Adriel Santos works from Riacho de Santana, Bahia, where he was born and where he continues to live and develop his practice as a visual artist. His own presentation describes a body of work that moves through drawing, printmaking, and painting, with a focus on contemporary explorations of impressions and forms. At the center of that research is the construction of masculine identity, especially masculinities in the sertao, marked by the tension between tradition and change. This is a precise and demanding field: Santos is not simply painting the male body as a subject, but asking how that body is performed, inherited, watched, restrained, and reimagined. The sertao appears here not as scenery, but as a social and emotional structure. See also Cordel Does Not Fit in Drawers: Marina Nabuco on the Living Archive of Instituto Brincante.
The selected works, many of them painted in electric blues, violets, pinks, and bronze-like passages, transform the body into a site of pressure and possibility. In the first image, a crouched figure meets the viewer directly from a saturated blue field. The pose is guarded and exposed at once, while the skin becomes a map of color rather than a stable surface. Another standing figure stretches across a sky-like ground, suspended between vulnerability and assertion. These paintings resist the old language of hardness often attached to masculinity. Their bodies are bright, porous, theatrical, and emotionally charged. Even when the figure smiles, the image does not become simple; joy, self-consciousness, and exposure remain intertwined. See also Isabela Leao and the Porcelain Edge of Feeling.
Visual language
Santos's research text explains that his production seeks to resignify the male body in the sertao, questioning traditional stereotypes and creating new narratives for a memory of resistance and adaptation. He works mainly with acrylic on canvas, but the paintings begin before paint: the body is placed in performance before another person, photographed, digitally altered, and finally painted into another body. That process matters because it gives the work several lives. The image starts as presence, becomes document, becomes digital intervention, and then becomes painting. The final surface carries those layers as color, distortion, posture, and mood. This movement between media also prevents the portrait from behaving like evidence; each image is a constructed encounter.
For CASCA, Adriel Santos's importance lies in the way he treats masculinity as an image under construction rather than a fixed identity. The cactus painting, stripped of the figure but still bodily in its upright form, sits beside portraits that make solitude, theatricality, desire, silence, and self-observation visible. His research has generated the series Menino, nao chore!!!, a title that already exposes the emotional command embedded in many masculine formations. Across these works, Santos turns that command into painting: not to illustrate masculinity, but to loosen it, stain it, stage it, and make room for bodies that can be seen beyond inherited rules. His palette makes that revision unmistakable, replacing muted restraint with color that insists on tenderness, friction, and change.
