David Elia's work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references. In his highly worked drawings, David Elia creates new narratives using abstract geometry combined with a meandering mark making and iconography from the Brazilian environmental geography that for the artist becomes a way of suggesting an unravelling of an “Antropofagic manifestation”.
“Antropofagia”, or “cannibalism”, is the most potent and durable metaphor in modern Brazilian culture. It is a concept that provides a way to conceive of Brazilian culture as a struggle between native and foreign, colonized and colonizer, barbarie and civilization. It is simultaneously a metaphor that links ritual cannibalism with the quest for cultural originality.
The Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) was published in 1928 by the Brazilian poet and polemicist Oswaldo de Andrade. Its argument is that Brazil’s history of "cannibalizing" other cultures is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernist’s interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European post-colonial cultural domination.