New exhibition at the Alberto Sarmento gallery

In Rio de Janeiro I had a big atelier in Copacabana. When I finished painting, I used to put three large paintings on the wall to watch them carefully, to confront myself with my own work - me in the room, me in the paintings, in an exercise of dialectics, of self-knowledge, on the way to the great discoveries.
At that time I had a cleaning lady called Eva. She was almost illiterate and she used to painfully read the Bible while she was cooking, beans, chicken soup and all the kitchen delights of Minas Gerais, my home state. Having studied carefully my paintings, I called Eva to have her opinion as erudite and art critics. I always asked the same two questions:

- Which one is the best painting? Which one do you like best, the one that reminds you your homeland and make you think about your family?

To the first question, Eva wouldn't know what to answer; she was embarrassed, looked at one painting, then the other, then the third one, with big astonished eyes, wary and confused. To the second question, her eyes suddenly became illuminated, shed laughed, happy, and she pointed right away to one of the paintings, genuine and sincere.

Art is what makes you feel emotions, what makes your eyes shining and what touches your heart. There is no explanation to art, nor mine, nor Eva's in the kitchen.

The inauguration of this new exhibition will take place on October 15, at 6.30 pm, at the Alberto Sarmento gallery, rua da Madalena, 215, Lisbon.

The party will go on at the Irish pub O'Gillins, rua dos Remolares, Lisbon, from 10.30pm.

Exhibition "movimento" at the gallery Magia Imagem

Drawing was always a way to get to painting. Sometimes I like to play a game, a game between drawing and painting, I don't limit myself to drawing, because we get stuck between the lines. The question of affectivity is to let the emotions flow freely and to free the mind. The brush strokes express the emotions through the gesture, in a state of ego-freedom, of non-consciousness.

I think that the way of doing, the act of the mind when painting is a convergence between two opposed entities, consciousness/non-consciousness. When I paint a picture about tauromachy, I'm painting the emotions, the gesture, the ritual, I try to feel inside the bull-fighter's mind, between life and death. The bull is a noble animal, it just takes a big stain of black and I see the bull, the black colour shakes the concepts. There is a very strong convergence point, and every brush stroke turn into a dance. In these paintings, I explore the mind, like a therapeutic act, through non-consciousness, or automatism.

We are thinking animals, and we fulfil our thoughts when we don't think and when we don't calculate. There is a certain relationship between the lines and the strokes. A long time ago, I said that there were the veins running through the picture, the strokes are the nerves, I felt the necessity to express my emotions through the strokes on the picture. In my school time, when the teacher was away from the classroom, I used to go to the blackboard to draw and to scribble, there were coloured chalks. Painting is going back to childhood, I free my mind and sometimes I feel like this child scribbling on the linen.

The idea of truthfulness comes from the earnestness of painting, expressing through painting with authenticity. I say that rivers of colours are running, like in a poem, and truthfulness comes from a way of painting with your own blood, in a metaphoric sense, a way to transcend the techniques, for the virtuosity of painting turns into an art without artefacts.

Saulo Silveira

The stroke and gesture of Cícero Manoel

Cícero Manoel is 38 years-old, he lives and he works in Teresina, Brazil, far away from the cultural agitation of the big centres.

It happens that Cícero Manoel is an excellent sketcher, with a creative light stroke, quite rare for a young man who practically never went outside the borders of his native state, except for a few participations in collective exhibitions in Fortaleza and Brasilia.

He's got a degree in Literature from the Federal University of Piauí, but he never lectured. On the other hand, he explored his evident artistic vein, electing the drawing as a way of expression. As Mário de Andrade says, "the drawing speaks, is a sort of scripture, a calligraphy, much more than a plastic art".

Cícero Manoel is not an artist that takes the large dimensions of linen or paper as a challenge. His works, usually small, are even sparing of strokes, but when observing attentively each of them, we will see that the artist manages to transmit all his emotion, either in black and white, either in his other works where he uses the Indian ink or the pencil or the coloured crayon in a sensitive and creative manner. Sensibility is not missing in the works of Cícero Manoel. That's why he captures and attracts his audience. There is a huge empathy between his works and his audience, it's undeniable.

Each drawing is a lesson of elaborate composition, scrupulous in the details, tidy in the technique, and reveals the artist as an attentive observer of the subjects he likes, from the churches of his native state to the objects he lives with. That makes him an artist that talks about reality, even when he geometrizes or abstracts the forms.

Geraldo Edson de Andrade