A lush dreamscape of colors, figures, and symbols of the indigenous Brazilian Macuxi people, O pajé curando tabaco is a spectacular example of Jaider Esbell's virtuosic painting. The work is richly embedded with intricate detail in every corner; plants, animals and fantastic creatures emerge and recede as the eye passes across the canvas, and one can get lost in its spectacle of imagery. Forces of the Amazon rainforest and all of its inhabitants emanate from the canvas; Esbell's art demands, beyond the senses, immersion. His paintings reflect the Macuxi's ways of thinking in the way they are constructed with superimposed layers, with elements of the past, the present, and the future, showing time, "as the simultaneity and interaction between the subjective and social, magical and political, a transit between worlds" (Leandro Muniz, "Jaider Esbell e a sobreposição de mundos," Revista SeLecT, 2 July 2021).

Jaider Esbell was born in 1979 in Raposa Serra do Sol in the land of the Macuxi, in what is commonly referred to as the Brazilian state of Roraima. Under the tutelage of Bernaldina José Pedro, a Macuxi Indigenous rights activist, Esbell grew up participating in various social movements. At age 18, Esbell left his village to work as an electrician, a job he would maintain for the next 20 years before quitting in 2016 to focus on his art full-time. He only recently earned international acclaim before sadly passing away 2021 at the age of 41. In 2016 he won the PIPA prize and later in 2021 he was the highlight at the Bienal de São Paulo, he also curated the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition, Moquém_Surarî: Contemporary Indigenous Art. This was an important part of his activism, shining a light and representing indigenous cultures and artists of Brazil. His work is now owned by prominent museums and institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and the present work is his first work to come to auction in the United States.

Esbell considered his paintings, drawings, and conceptual works as existing at the nexus of art and activism. His paintings and drawings often portray brightly painted animals interacting with the landscapes in which they are set. They draw on Macuxi views on nature, as well as myths and cosmologies. The Pajé for which the work is named is known in many indigenous Brazilian cultures as a shaman and healer, who performs the pajelança, his ritual. Lima Baretto, an anthropologist and scholar on indigenous Brazilian cultures wrote of the Pajé, “The pajé is usually imagined as a little old man who has the power to transit between the universe of the gods or the dead, who speaks with animals, plants or minerals to acquire supernatural powers…It is an imaginary imbued with exoticism that the media, school books and science itself have spread within non-indigenous society,” (Lima Baretto, “Centro de Medicina Indígena da Amazônia: Concepções e práticas de saúde indigenous,” Amazônica – Anthropology Magazine, v. 9, no. 2 P. 594-612. 2017).