Figuração e Negritude:

a Arte e o Outro como Ficção

Abstract

 In Negerplastik, Carl Einstein demonstrates the fallibility of the alleged superiority of European Art in relation to its African counterpart. Einstein denounces the logic of the western pictorial model of the classical era by contrasting it to the African sculptural plasticity. Western Art depends on a figurative architecture rooted in naturalism and whose persuasiveness resides in the possibility of converting its narratives into sufficiently credible fictions whose rhetorical effect established ‘blackness’ as a ‘figure’ fabricated by History and its fictional and imagetic structures. This text proposes the scraping of this figurative landscape with a view to understanding how ‘blackness’ might be reinvented by contemporary artistic poiesis. By analyzing the works of three Brazilian black contemporary artists, namely, Rosana Paulino, Dalton Paula and Antônio Obá, this article is anchored in the notions of figure and fiction, as established by textual references in Art History and Theory of History.