Okay, we did this in reverse order, but it really doesn’t matter. Dimitri’s place was first, followed by our look-see in the Hotel.
We were all standing around outside the Convento do Carmo talking about what we wanted to eat. (Duh). Carol looked up to see a tall, grey haired man in cabana shirt and sandals coming out of the hotel. “Dimitri!” she called. He replied with a beautiful European tint on the word “Moh-leee!” (Mollie) Everybody down there calls Carol that. Her real name is Mollie Carol James Cerqueira. She was always called Carol growing up, since her mother’s name is also Mollie. Once she went to college, she started going by Mollie, since it was her first name, and in college people always call you by the first name they see. So Nelson knows her as Mollie. (They met at Indiana U where he was a professor). And everybody in Salvador knows her as Mollie. Jean and I stubbornly call her Carol. But the “Mollie” is so pervasive, that I even heard Pettus refer to her by that moniker more than once. Her brothers and sister call her Carol, as does her mother, so it’s kind of her American name. Mollie is her Brazilian name. It’s quite simple.
The man was Dimitri Ganzelevitch,
the owner of an incredible gallery right down the street from the hotel!
Carol had been telling us about how she and the kids had seen the place at an earlier date, and how fantastic it was. And here he was, right here in front of us! And he was inviting us to his gallery, which is also his home.
We cobble-hobbled down about a half a block until we came to his place on the left. Beautiful from the outside.
Incredible on the inside. This man had great taste in art, and a prescient eye to match. His specialty was outsider art, but he had a lot of established stuff as well. His own collection was mixed in with what he had to sell, and it was an overwhelming melange.
His modus operandi is to find these untrained artists from wherever they hide, and collect, nurture, and show them. The naive art in Salvador is very much like some of the earlier Southern outsider stuff. Before many of the outsiders themselves became savvy to the buck.
One of his artists had developed a method of capturing graffiti and actually lifting it from building fronts by smearing a polymer-type substance on the facade, letting it set, then peeling it off. The graffiti comes off with it, largely, leaving uneven patches that lend even more interest. I immediately saw Basquiat in the canvases, and the fact that it was graffiti to begin with made it all the more sensible. Dimitri congratulated me on my perception (puff, puff) and pulled out a magazine that contained a quote by him about this artist, saying the same thing. I hate to call him “the artist.” I wish I had gotten names. Maybe Carol will know what to do? Maybe we can email Dimitri at dimitri.bahia@qmail.com or try this.
The artist worked not only in undercover situations, but in the open as well, when he could. Dimitri told us how he had been ripped off several times by people who would wait for him to complete the process, then steal the result from him on the spot! Wow! Talk about bad karma. Art with a hex on it.
I wrote an e-mail to Dimitri, and he quickly replied. The name of the graffiti artist is Willyams Martins. The author of the heads is Eckenberger, an Argentinian of German descent. He presently has a showing of 40 years of his works, curated by Dimitri. One friend commented: “I wouldn’t want to get into his dreams.”
Another of the artists was a surrealist to make Max Ernst stand up and take notice.
The variety was immense, but very, very good. Of course seeing all this new art at once and talking with this guy in his gorgeous, but very hot, house, I had begun to sweat profusely again. I didn’t take any pictures except the mask above (when he was in the other room), and I didn’t ask him if I could. I wish I had, but somehow it seemed kinda tacky.
His house was incredible, of course. Hundreds of years old, on three levels, with galleries on three floors, it opened on the bottom floor to a courtyard, garden, and freeking amphitheatre! All three levels of this glorious old place had views of Salvador, since we were still very high up in the city. This amphitheatre had terra cotta poles with sculptured heads on top of them inset into the plant covered wall. I finally asked him if I could take pictures of the heads, and he said “of course”. So I guess I’m a schmuck after all for not asking to begin with. Sigh. The pictures of the heads are kinda blurry, because they were taken at 2 seconds exposure, and it was dark out there.
At any rate, Dimitri was charming, with an accent that would melt butter. His love of Salvador and his artists was evident. His life seemed to be idyllic. We thanked him profusely and left to get some food somewhere. Carol was thinking rapidly of what we could have. The GPS in her head had keyed in on several options, with her deciding on blackeyed-pea fritters from Dinha do Acarajé in her neighborhood, Rio Vermelho.
Here again, I was a chicken and didn’t even bring my camera out. One reason was, I was hot, sweaty, and kinda knotted up in the gullet again. I wasn’t thinking properly. I was hungry, I thought. And surely, I was ready for some kind of bebida, wasn’t I? Not particularly. We pulled up at an open place on the side of the street filled with tables, and a couple of large tents. It was right across the street from the Villa Forma Gym! I was getting so familiar with the area! Carol and Nelson really do live right over downtown Rio Vermelho, and it’s a hopping place! Dinha do Acarajé, according to Carol, had been pitching her tents here for years, and her children were working behind her, and she had a storefront restaurant, and was hugely successful. She was Afro-Brazilian, and her servers wore the traditional turbans and big shiny skirts. They looked so hot. I mean, like it would be hot to wear them. It made me kinda queasy in a way, which is weird.
I ordered a water right away and chugged it. Then we ordered our food. They cook it under the tents, and the waiters bring it to you. I wonder who gets paid for them to do this here. It’s like “their spot” and no matter if somebody came in earlier and set their stuff up, I think Dinha would run him off. WHO GETS PAID? We ordered the blackeyed pea fritters stuffed with stuff. It’s called acarajé and abará. They were stuffed with vinaigrette salad and pepper, called vatapá. It was marvelous, and the beer I had was marvelous, but I did not possess my traditional gusto. The little knot in my stomach kept reminding me of everything bad I had ever eaten. Crazy.
Regardless of the knot, we had a fine, fine time, and in retrospect, I hate that I was such a puss to not bring my camera. The waiter was charmed with Patricia (as were most of the young men in Salvador), she laid some REAL Portuguese on him, and we headed to the SUV to go up the hill a few blocks and prepare for our first night at Carnaval!