Artur Pereira (Cachoeira do Brumado MG 1920 - idem 2003)
Sculptor.
Born in a small district of the municipality of Mariana, has seven brothers (Dorvalina, Amélia, Maria, Lucília, Geraldo, Abelardo and Rosalina)¹. His memories are of a difficult childhood: he begins to work with his father as a child and does not attend school. The father, farmer and street vendor of soapstone pots, dies when Artur Pereira is between 15 and 18 years old. The mother is a seamstress and works from home. As a boy, he makes small clay animals for cribs, which, as he says, are very pleasing to the girls of the village².
During life, he carries out the activities of a lumberjack, charcoal and, later, a bricklayer, In addition to working in the fields during the countryside, planting corn, beans and rice. He marries Juvenil dos Reis Pereira, known as Dona Fiota. They have five children. While he lives on a ranch far from the city, when he works as a woodcutter, he produces wooden troughs and, once, a cat who lives with him in cedar. Despite the praise, Artur Pereira leaves the sculpture aside and returns to it only in the 1960s, when he settles again in Cachoeira do Brumado, after approximately 20 years spent in the woods, chopping wood and returning to Vila Natal during the rainy season³.
Always in cedar, he starts to sculpt isolated animals, such as ox, jaguar, dog and lion. The pieces are painted with the paint that existed and the body parts, such as limbs and paws, are glued. In 1968, he made his first sculptures of more than one figure. These are animal sets that sometimes also include men, carved in a single piece of wood. Its first set is a hunt; the second a crib. In 1971, he won a crib contest promoted by the Ouro Preto Art Foundation. His pieces are now more projected, being sold in galleries in different cities in the country. It is during this period that he begins to earn some money from his sculptures and starts to dedicate himself exclusively to it.
His work is admired and accompanied by dealers and artists, such as Amilcar de Castro (1920-2002), Paulo Vasconcellos (1932-2010), César Aché (1953) and Renato Madureira (1960). In 1989, Artur Pereira has an individual at the Espaço Cultural Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, in Rio de Janeiro. His pieces are presented in press conferences such as Brésil, Arts Populaires (Paris, 1987) and a show of rediscovery (at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2000). In 2009, the Moreira Salles Institute makes a retrospective of his work, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. 1960. Its unique characteristics draw the attention of people in the art, whether collectors, dealers or other artists. The paradoxes of the haughtiness and simplicity of their figures stand out, as well as the indefinite, although familiar character of their animals. The plays, evidently outside the erudite canon, lead commentators and admirers to try to understand and situate the work of Artur Pereira. It seeks to understand how a simple man without artistic training can create such instigating works, which refer to modern artists such as Tarsila do Amaral (1886 - 1973)4 and Brancusi (1876 - 1957)5.
Some commentators suggest the resemblance to the Baroque Mineiro and the Salomonic columns of their churches to explain the sculptor's solutions6. In fact, Cachoeira do Brumado is the city of the Gold Cycle and has a baroque church, in which Artur Pereira says he helped to make repairs7.
It is also a fact that some of his pieces, usually called "columns", have a structure similar to the Baroque columns. Carved in trunk sections and emptied inside, its walls feature spirals of animals in a row and plants. Sculpture is, therefore, leaked, and animals and plants form a kind of lace, as they are adjacent to each other, in a continuity that reveals the interdependence of the natural world and its components. The art criticism, writer and anthropologist Lelia Coelho Frota calls them forests, which reinforces the reference to the trees of life, made by the artist José Alberto Nemer8, and refers us to a symbolism that can be related to the Baroque columns.
However, these are not the first pieces produced by Artur Pereira. The striking characteristics of his works - singularity, simplification, familiarity and ambiguity, for example - are already present in the first isolated animals. These animals, as he calls them, are jaguars, dogs, cats, oxen, birds, etc., but they can also be undefined, bringing together characteristics of different animals, although they never seem like monstrous or fantastical beings. Regardless of their identity, they are stylized and rounded and, for the most part, clearly formed by the joining of cylinders, despite being carved into a single piece of wood. Sizes vary, without worrying about the proportions between the animals. Rounding is explained by Frota as resulting from the first clay sculptures, a material that favors curvilinear treatment9.
Nemer refers to Tarsila do Amaral, raising the hypothesis that the atavistic relationship with nature can explain this treatment10. The critic Rodrigo Naves highlights the use of cedar, soft wood and without veins, but also the similarity with certain artisanal objects of rural life, such as ex-votos, pylons, sprockets, etc.11 It should be noted that Artur Pereira also worked with stone Soap, another soft material, and that, before starting to sculpt, makes cedar troughs.
The relationship with certain everyday objects seems significant, but does not account for all the artist's works, as in group sculptures. In them, either there are only animals, or these are predominant. In general, they can be divided into antlers and cribs. The antlers, like the columns, make evident the initial shape of the raw wood. The figures accompany the ramifications of the tree. They are pieces that sometimes seem in unstable equilibrium because they show on the base smaller animals that support, for example, huge jaguars, which does not match reality or the sculptural canon. The cribs do not follow traditional Christian iconography either, as they bring animals that are not normally present in the biblical scene and also strongly privilege animals to the detriment of human figures. The cribs, like the antlers, are carved in a single piece of wood.
These pieces and the columns are sometimes related to certain productions of popular art, which present a conception of the particular world, intertwining social, natural and religious aspects. This would be shown in his works as contiguity and indistinction between the parties. However, as Naves shows, Artur Pereira's plays always remain between interdependence and isolation.
The universal character would be deduced from the formal simplification, the absence of details that contributes to the haughtiness of the animals. These characteristics are based on more symbolic readings that identify archetypal images in their works. This type of interpretation, moreover, is common when it comes to the so-called popular art.
However, it does not seem fruitful to analyze these artists under the same generic label as "popular art," but rather try to find in each one its singularity. For ships, the interest and beauty of Artur Pereira's work is due to a certain relationship with nature and life itself. The final effect, which allows the establishment of so many relationships with the history of art, but does not allow itself to fit into its usual categories.
Notes
1 Em Frota, 1978, p. 29, Arthur cites seven brothers. In Nemer, José Alberto. Artur Pereira: words and works; in NAVES, R. (Org.). Artur Pereira: sculptures. São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2009, p. 103, he says that there are seven brothers, counting on him and suggests that one of them dies early.
2 FROTA, 1978, p. 30.
3 Aché, Caesar. under the eyes of the jaguar, in PEREIRA, A. Artur Pereira. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, 1989.
4 NEMER, op. cit., p. 105.
5 ships, op. cit., p. 14.
6 Nemer, op. cit., p. 103; ships, op. cit.; p. 22; Ache, op. cit.
7 fleet, op. cit., p. 30.
8 Fleet, op. cit., p. 31 and Nemer, op. cit., p. 110.
9 Fleet, op. cit., p. 31.
10 Nemer, op. cit., p. 105.
11 ships, op. cit., p. 18-19.
Source: Itaú Cultural
