Let us imagine that former General Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), one of the main figures responsible for the Haitian Revolution, which took place between August 21, 1791, and January 1, 1804, were to read and contemplate the works of Helcio Barros: an artist and writer born in 1956, trained in cinema at Fluminense Federal University (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and raised in one of the nation-states that received the largest contingents of Bantús, Hauçás, Iorubás, Jejês, and many other African nations in this “new world”.
This encounter between the general and the artist, both intellectuals, would, in my understanding, revolve around two central paradigms of interest. Both share, within their moral fiber and at the core of their struggle, values that intersect and recognize one another: the broad and democratic desire for the right to Land and the right to Letters, crossed by the constant breaking of expectations historically imposed upon us.
Helcio Barros operates within what we may call an Avant La Lettre¹. Even before the systematization and founding of the Vilanism² brotherhood, his production already manifested the radical practice of looking at the pillars of Western modernity –Liberty, Equality, Fraternity– through the lens of rupture, defying the norms designed for a Black artist. As Sueli Carneiro states in her vast philosophical body of work –“Between left and right, I remain Black”– this means, in other words, pushing the left and its cradle of origin (the French Empire) even further to the left, in its poetics, ethos, and becoming.
Just as Toussaint Louverture radicalized the French Enlightenment by applying it to the lands of Ayiti, Barros uses his cinematic and visual arts training to “rewrite” history within this territory. In the same way, Haiti and Puerto Rico especially nourish and permeate his visual imagination, moving between figuration and abstraction, the atmosphere of painting and its possible long takes, drawn directly from the editing table of his poetics. His themes turn toward fauna, the continuous fragmentation of forms, and a profusion of colors throughout his production and epistemology.
As a painter and sculptor, he seeks not merely form, but the foundation of a new ethics that precedes official cartography itself: the practice of Avant la Terre.
In his trajectory, he connects South America, the Caribbean, and Europe, all of which merge in his gaze and in his “Pré Vilania” (in reference to Vilanism). The artist himself identifies as a Villain –this is how, in one of our meetings and exchanges, he urged us to visit his studio, seeing us not only as comrades in struggle, but also as colleagues in craft and direct custodians of transmitting his legacy, ethics, production methodology, and articulation with the arts circuit.
The central tension of the work lies in a composition that mimics the “Brazilian family portrait,” populated by figures from a conservative middle class. In the background stands the figure of the “Villain”: a Black man whose clothing breaks with the aesthetics of status embodied by that family unit. His presence is not merely a representation of the “other,” but a visual denunciation of what the national project sought to render invisible. It is the embodiment of the alterity that the official Brazilian narrative attempted –and still attempts– to exclude from its self-portrait.
It is the radical humanism of one who understands that this land was forged by hands the white aesthetic sought to erase. His investigation consists of acts of recovery. Barros proposes a paradigm in which the “Villain” is not the antagonist of the fable, but the protagonist of a resistance that official “letters” failed to contain. His work asserts itself through the radical presence of abstraction and of a form that looks backward –and toward the earth– as an element of autonomy and reconciliation, projected toward a future where freedom is finally absolute and finally non-negotiable.
