Yellow and Red

The headdress is red and yellow. Under it — before any of that color arrived — I wrote by hand. Verses from Brazilian songs I grew up inside, laid straight onto the surface and then covered: acrylic first, then the writing, then the abstractions that carry the texture and the history, then a generous oil impasto, then gloss varnish. Carnival is not a matte event. The face is painted in a transparent red that never closes. Everything around it is built up and reflective; the face stays open. You look at it and you look through it at the same time. A feather in a headdress has a forest behind it. This is named Indigenous visual heritage, and Brazilian stones, and Brazilian words — memory with debts attached, not ornament lifted from a postcard. The headdress is a coronation: everyone is a participant in the party. The poems stay under the paint. You will never read them. They are still holding the picture up.