Circles breached, circles kept

I first saw Cult as a set of intervals rather than a single image: multiple stages of drawing that expanded, accrued, re-iterated, and finally thickened into a cosmology of some sort.

Omentejovem began with a few wiry figures under something you could call a cratered sun; then a red field arrived; then dotted borders and moons, and, at the end, the circle became a black arena ringed with beads, full of colored mini circles, with the red background having disappeared, and thoughts that you can read between the lines – literally.

The start

The seed for this work sits in Bali. During Silk Road Chapter 02, we all joined a local opening blessing – a mantra intonation of “Om”, our eyes closed, incense and flowers in our hands, grains of rice pressed to our foreheads, woven bracelets for luck, strikes of a loud bell. A rite of protection, but most of us there at the time didn’t know the full meaning of each gesture; we just stood there, followed, listened, meditated.

That mix of participation and therefore consent, led by curiosity and just partial understanding, is the stage that set the tone for Cult – the new 1/1 artwork by the Brazilian artist omentejovem (2001). The work recognises the good of communal forms, but also the opacity that is always there when you enter someone else’s circle.

When was the last time you looked up to the stars?

The collection we presented with omentejovem during our Silk Road event in Bali, Stories on Circles, trained the artist – and later our own eyes – to read a boundary (the circle) as a productive limit. Now, Cult keeps this element of a circular container, but cracks it open at the same time.

The final composition looks to me like a double vessel, a bowl within a bowl, banded by beads that slide between ornaments and (alarm) signals. Inside, one bigger and three slender ‘figures’ orbit a compact cluster of ovals – call it a heart, the firepit, the center, or simply a knot of attention. Dotted paths mark their routes and around them the ‘ground’ pitches from deep black to saturated blue waves of water. At the rim, all the lunar phases are in view, and it looks like the galaxy is shining bright tonight. With Cult, omentejovem aims to address a question he mentioned during the creation process: when do we truly participate and when do we drift into being guided unconsciously? For me, this piece resists an easy answer: it lets beauty and unease occupy the same bowl. There’s a certain unknown entity looming, but a curious fascination with what is happening at the same time.

Half moon or full moon

As Cult evolved, omentejovem kept toggling the canvas between landscape and portrait to test what the image “wanted”. In landscape, the figures read like a skyline, with different movement (heights) across from left to right. In portrait mode, the artist felt that gravity took over: the circle became a ‘pool’; a place where forces could collect. In the end, omentejovem chose the vertical version because he felt it let the drawing behave like a vessel rather than a panorama: “now a pressure moves down into it, and the group forms around that weight,” he says.

From the vertical stance, omentejovem began to thread in economic symbols and thoughts. There is a quiet reference to Bitcoin’s halving (the programmed cut in new coin issuance roughly every four years) in the work – a cyclical change that happens overhead while people continue their rituals below. He also introduced the diamond-like geometry that recalls the Ethereum logo, and it seems to me like he used that same shape as an armature, relocating the circle inside it.

With the Bitcoin mark on the left, the Ethereum one on the right, and in between the text ‘Fiat is worthless’, it’s needless to explain omentejovem’s belief in cryptocurrency. For the artist, Bitcoin set the stage for the blockchain as a whole, but through Ethereum he specifically got the chance to become an autonomous artist instead of having to keep doing creative work for clients. For me, this artwork diagrams how different ‘cultures of value’ overlap, and how small communities stand together inside those frames.

Are you in a cult?

In his own words, the artist is very explicit, saying that essentially anything could be or behave like a cult: money, society, family, art, etc. In this use, a cult is a structure that organises meaning and concentrates attention.

Omentejovem’s new drawing doesn’t just depict a group. It tests what it means to stand inside one. The title may seem blunt, but I feel it’s actually useful. It makes us confront a word most of us would rather assign to others. In your mind you can hear people judge the idea of a cult, saying: ‘I’d never let myself become a part of something like that’. This artwork reframes the concept as a question: Which circles are we actually a part of? Which ones are we willing to keep, and on what terms?

In my opinion, the work doesn’t try to resolve the tension between blessing and capture, between gratitude and fear, between meaning and doubt. It gives us a nudge to think about the multiple sides of groups we’re part of, and to see how we actually feel about them.