The Transcendental Journey of an Amazonian Artist

Portrait of Roberto Evangelista, 1970s

Roberto Evangelista was born in Cruzeiro do Sul, in the Brazilian Amazon, in 1946. He passed away in Manaus, Brazil, in 2019. In the 1960s, he met his partner, Ana Maria Evangelista, with whom he shared his life and spiritual journey. In 1970, they converted to União do Vegetal (UDV), an Amazonian reincarnationist religion based on the consumption of the entheogenic drink Ayahuasca. Roberto became a master of UDV, and Ana Maria a counselor, four years later.¹

During this period, Roberto began producing art objects, installations, and videos. In his words, the artworks were made by reaching a higher level of consciousness through the consumption of Ayahuasca tea. The text below is based on three conversations between Ana Maria Evangelista and art historian Gabriela Paiva de Toledo that took place between August 2023 and May 2024.

This article is presented as part of the Cisneros Institute's Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in Twentieth Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970, an ongoing research project that invites artists and experts from Latin America and the Caribbean to explore modern and contemporary art in relation to spirituality, with a particular focus on Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, occult, Jewish, and Catholic traditions.
—Gabriela Paiva de Toledo, art historian and Cisneros Research Fellow

Ana Maria Evangelista and Roberto Evangelista, location unknown, 2020s

It is through coexistence—understanding and sharing with others—that we learn. Roberto and I have always shared our lives and ideas. Our relationship was based on open dialogue; when one of us took a different view of things, the other took part. Art was his way of seeing the world differently. And it has also become a means of sharing his view, not only with me but also with others.

This desire was often embodied in the artworks. Some works became a collective movement, a family dance. There was an artwork—an installation designed to occupy the entire gallery, made up of painted hoarding panels and photographs of the wooden houses of riverside dwellers along the Amazon —in which we all took part.²2 We turned the living room of our house into a painting studio, and the whole family took part in making the painted wooden plates, which were then assembled in the gallery. In another work, an experimental video, Roberto recorded our daughters repeating the gesture of combing their hair.³

Resgate, a “happening” at Ponta Negra Beach, Manaus, in February 1992. Roberto is pictured in the center.

Across his entire career as an artist, I would say that repetition is the backbone of Roberto’s work. In his early works in installation and video art from the 1970s, he used gourd bowls, popular in the Amazon. He increased the use of gourds in his works the following decades. For the Indigenous people of the Amazon, the gourd is a symbolic object connected to the sacred. In Roberto’s work, its circular shape transcends into spirituality − the circle represents the eternal cycle of things and humanity. It was the beginning of a journey of an ethical and spiritual commitment to nature.⁴

In one sense, art is repetition –of collective memory and shared experiences− through a new situation. I think this is the meaning of art. I am not an artist, I am a teacher. I have always thought that the best way to transmit knowledge is by using art as a vehicle. Art produces fiction that revives universal shared experiences. Every new artistic event activates collective memory. The relationship between art, myth, and the sacred lies in this potential for eternal repetition.

Roberto Evangelista. Ritos de Passagem. 1996. Installation, shoe boxes, used shoes, limestone, sand, and glass, 1000 x 1000 cm. Installation view, 23rd São Paulo Biennial, Universalis, 1996

Roberto’s questions about the repetition of things over time, reincarnation, and eternal return intensified when he took philosophy courses at the University of Amazonas in the 1960s. He always thought that the Amazon rainforest held something very precious. It was then that he read The Morning of the Magicians, by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels.⁵ Through this book, he had a double encounter: with magical realism, the mix of fiction and reality that would come to characterize his work, and with Ayahuasca. This encounter also addressed questions that I had been carrying with me for a long time. So, I decided to accompany him on this quest.

It was in November 1970, when we participated in our first União do Vegetal session, that Master Florêncio handed us our first cup of Ayahuasca tea.⁶ I remember feeling transported to another level of consciousness, to another time, and experiencing something in common with others. This was a period of awakening consciousness. At the same time, Roberto was awakening the art that already lived within him. In his own words, the immersion in Ayahuasca gave him a new transcendental concept of art, grounded in elements of nature present in the daily lives of our people.⁷

Roberto Evangelista installing Resgate at the exhibition America: Bride of the Sun. 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries, Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium, 1992

Roberto Evangelista, Regina Vater. Niká Uiícana, Homenagem a Chico Mendes. Installation view, Travels: Here and There, Clock Tower Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, 1989

He understood that there is a spiritual link, an existential continuity, between humans and nature. In nature, he discovered the genesis of the cognitive morphology that shapes the world, and began to observe its repetition throughout history. This insight reverberates throughout his work; you can see it in his first experimental video, Mater Dolorosa.⁸ This also arose from religious experience: in União do Vegetal, it was necessary to conduct research in the forest to understand the circumstances that enable the growth of the native Mariri vine and Chacrona tree, which are used in the preparation of the tea, which we call Vegetal.

Vegetal teaches about unity. It is not one, but two that become one −Mariri vine and Chacrona tree. It teaches us that nothing occurs in isolation, but that the creative force is produced through encounters and combinations. This principle permeated our lives and penetrated Roberto’s creative process. It also became the conceptual principle of his work; it uses gourds, which echo the saying *niká uiícana*—many inhabit one.⁹

As told to Gabriela Paiva de Toledo