To blue

So black it’s almost blue, a trivial commentary in lands where racial differences are seamed by a routine prejudice brokered to those who can be exempted from blackness. Thus, colorism has, for a long time, refined gradations and terms that go from the bluest blue to the least brown to draw a distinction between blacks and whites. Such distinctions confirm or deny our belonging to African ancestry.

Ultramarine blue, in the exhibition On the promises we made, by Kika Carvalho, is the protagonist and a trigger for racial metaphor. In most paintings, shoreline landscapes prevail. The beach, an allegedly democratic venue who welcomed, over the course of four centuries, in colonized countries, the swarms of people coming from the African continent under inhuman conditions. Even though, to this day, it remains held by a bourgeoisie ...