On the third floor of the New York gallery Salon 94 is an exhibition featuring Aislan Pankararu, an artist from Petrolândia, a small city in the interior of the state of Pernambuco that belongs to the Indigenous Pankararu people of Northeastern Brazil. If you were to look at Pankararu’s work long enough, it might begin to dance before your eyes. Overlapping organic shapes filled in with fine dots and hatched lines appear to coil, undulate, and expand, creating illusory motion. This effect may be the result of Pankararu’s unique approach to contrast. He uses dark supports and distinct colours to uphold white as a predominant pigment in combinations of acrylic and permanent marker, as well as a natural clay material traditionally used in the Pankararu community for body painting. Brown leather, linen, and craft paper surfaces evoke skin and earth and play an essential role in the optical sensation of shifting depths.

In the wide horizontal work Expansão da Matriz (Matrix Expansion), a layered composition is created through Pankararu’s use of several different types of white colouring. The brightest shades sweep across those tinted with pale blue or pink; geometric and organic marks swarm together to suggest larger circles, rings, and spirals emerging from the beige linen. The seamless tessellation of smaller patterns into larger ones makes for microcosms—worlds within worlds. Together they are hardly contained even by the enormous bounds of the canvas. In smaller works, such as those from the Êxodo (Exodus) series, white marks form separate bodies floating in the space of brown craft paper. They could be individual diagrams, symbols, or organisms, and like the larger works, they become more complex upon closer examination. The motifs forming Aislan’s patterns reveal themselves as neither wholly abstract nor figural—sometimes they seem floral or microbial, but never overtly representational.

Even with white as a foremost colour, Pankararu’s 40-plus compositions on view at New York’s Salon 94 are hardly the work of a stark minimalist. Endless River is his first solo exhibition in the US since he entered the art scene seven years ago after completing his degree in medicine at the University of Brasília. Within the self-taught drawing practice he had been developing for years, he began to incorporate his study of cellular molecular structures with references to his Indigenous upbringing. These references include cosmological motifs rooted in the Toré—a ritual dance within Pankararu culture—and pictorial adaptations from ceremonial body painting. His work also began to speak to the semi-arid “Caatinga” biome of Northeastern Brazil where Aislan was raised, drawing from forms of native cacti, roots, leaves, seed pods, and flowers used for traditional healing practices. Andrew Blackley, director of Salon 94, told STIR, “Aislan came to Brasília from a somewhat insulated community, and finding himself in that urban, administrative world of medicine, he was trying to find ways to negotiate two different parts of himself. Through practising art, he found it easier to reconcile his training as a doctor with a more ancestral knowledge of healing.”

Pankararu held his first exhibition, Abá Pukuá, in 2020, a collaboration with the Humanization Committee of the University Hospital of Brasília (HUB) where he studied. From there, he participated in multiple exhibitions, projects, and residencies throughout Brazil, then debuting at Galatea in São Paulo with his show Ancestral Mitochondria, curated by Lisette Lagnado, in 2023. After that, Salon 94 began planning to bring Endless River to the United States in collaboration with Galatea, as part of the gallery’s larger initiative to work with Indigenous artists globally. Blackley talked to STIR about how their measures began with artists like Raven Halfmoon, a sculptor of the Caddo nation, and the estate of Christine McHorse, a Diné ceramicist. He said, “We’re committed to forming a platform for many different ways of reading and showing art. There are questions we have about the canon, and we aim to challenge singularity in a telling of our history...by introducing the unique inflections of global indigeneity. How can we place Indigenous artists in dialogue with mainstream canonical work, while allowing them to exist on their own terms?” Blackley mentioned the show running concurrently with Pankararu’s exhibition on Salon 94’s second floor, The Time and the Color, featuring paintings and sculptural bamboo works by pioneering Brazilian modernist Ione Saldanha. Alongside Endless River, Salon 94 considers both the artists’ positions within a larger Brazilian artistic community, its interactions with the Euro-American modern canon, as well as its distinctive language and autonomy. The curatorial vision of Salon 94 meditates on the spirit and ethics of such multiplicity, exploring how an artist like Aislan can be modern and international without disavowing the roots that inform his practice.

It’s important to note that Pankararu’s work in Endless River doesn’t disclose any sacred content of Pankararu's belief systems—obscuring narrative or figuration to resist appropriation. The artist instead works intuitively at junctures of biological, genetic, and ancestral knowledge, and innovates an enigmatic visual vocabulary unique to his multifaceted intellect. Blackley pointed out that Pankararu’s homeland of Petrolândia, being located on the coast of Brazil, doesn’t fit the stereotype of Indigenous communities in South America as utterly remote. He remarked that it has seen centuries of contact with Europe, and as a result, the Pankararu community speaks Portuguese. Much of their original language has been lost. “The show has a ‘lost’ quality. One of the most compelling things about Aislan’s work is the language created through the patterning, composition, and syntax of his paintings. There are ‘citations’ that reference body adornment, ceremonial dress, and the landscapes of the Pankararu people, and these provide access points, but there is also a lot of opacity at play, a certain threshold of information,” he told STIR. When immersed in Pankararu’s live, fluid surfaces, we can sense the depths of knowledge without fully grasping their secrets. Perhaps the optical effect is also one of protective camouflage.