MEMORIES AND RECONCILIATIONS: PORTINARI UNDER THE LENS OF WALTER BENJAMIN

Abstract

This article investigates the concept of "joyful reconciliation" formulated by Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street (1928) and its applicability to the analysis of Brazilian social painting, specifically in the works of Cândido Portinari from the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on the phrase, “Humanity must bid farewell to its past reconciled – and one form of reconciliation is joy,” we examine how Benjamin proposes an ethics of memory that refuses both forgetting and paralyzing resentment. We then show how Portinari, in paintings such as Mestiço (1934), Café (1935), and the Retirantes series (1944), pictorially elaborates a reconciliation with Brazil’s colonial past and social injustices, making the "vanquished of history" visible without idealizing or victimizing them. The analysis reveals that Benjaminian joy does not negate suffering but transfigures it dialectically: it embraces pain without erasing it, sublimating it into a representation that grants it dignity. In this perspective, joy emerges as a category that is simultaneously philosophical, political, and aesthetic, capable of affirming life amid ruins.