I always found Chagall's floating bride euphoria paintings more than a little cloying.  Who was the best painter of pained relationships, the Ingmar Bergman of paint?  Klimpt, Schiele, Kokoshka -  it's hard to say.  During the rotting and slow decay of my first marriage a series of works seeped out of me.  I still cannot evaluate them but they have some bitter sweet moments and a lot of bleak black laughter.

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Banzo is a Brazilian word, brought by Africans, over the Atlantic to Bahia.  It expresses a pain of loss, of longing, beyond heartbreak or depression, it is a space of sadness out of being. And yet Banzo is what Samba, and Forro and even Funke come out of.  No one does sad sad energy like the Brazilians unless it is early Peter Tosh.  If these paintings have a sound track it is Luis Gonzaga, or as they say in Brazil's North East,  Gonzagão, Rei do Baião.  You have to enjoy your pain, to  create out of it without being self indulgent.  That's not an easy trick to pull off but maybe some of these pictures get close.