Santídio Pereira. Galería Xippas
ArtNexus, #121 (Dec - May 2024)

During the months of March and April we were fortunate to have Da mata ao morro (From the forest to the mountains), an exhibition of works by the young Brazilian artist Santídio Pereira (1996), on display at Xippas gallery, in the outskirts of Punta del Este, which has become an area of important artistic activity in Uruguay. This was Pereira’s first visit and exhibition in the country.

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Pereira’s work is an agreeable invitation to breath nature, the bromeliads, the hills, and the horizon of Brazil’s Atlantic forest. He starts with a specific memory that is then amplified to an unfettered scale, displaying nature’s provocative power in its full splendor. Vegetation and landscapes are clipped for us in their majestic exuberance, in a process of framing and selection carried out internally by the artist. His forms capture and interpret the essence of a memory imprinted in his mind.

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Xippas’ hangar makes it possible to explore the work in a well-suited environment, surrounded by greenery, with warm late-afternoon weathers and a cool breeze. The exhibition is comprised of two series, the bromeliads and the hills—four paintings in oil-based offset ink, six woodcuts, and six gouaches—displayed together for the first time.

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Woodcutting is one of Pereira’s characteristic techniques, in a process he describes as “incision, cut, and fitting.” Some of the works have more incisions; others, more cuts; others, more fittings. The procedure, however, is always the same. Pereira first draws or sketches on wood panels; then, he makes cuts or incisions with the help of gauges and chisels; finally, he paints the various pieces and layers, and transfers the paint onto paper. One particularity of his woodcuts is the use of several matrices, superimposed in a single composition; in that way, each work becomes unique.

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Nature for Santídio Pereira is not the subject of mimesis, but a response to life experiences and emotions. In that way, he underscores painting’s communicative power, its ability to transmit in an image emotions and sensations that remind us of our first impression of the majesty of the landscape. Pereira’s work is traversed by a personal gaze, and his memory presents us only with a synthesis and an abstraction of his sensorial experience, which generates a new perspective on nature.

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For his creative process, Pereira requires direct contact with the environment, absorbing and capturing it sensorially through physical experience. After some time distilling and processing internally this information and experience—it could be days, months, or years—the artist returns it to the world. Some sensorial and aesthetic experiences gain presence in his work years later. For example, on one occasion during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pereira went to the Atlantic forest in search of bromeliads, and ended up producing the series with the hills; the horizon and the sierras came to his memory, a need for connection with the vastness of a visually expansive landscape he had been unable to find in the city of São Paulo.

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There is in Pereira’s work an intention and a search for joyful memories and moments, a desire to give them a place, to multiply them. In the past, he worked on other subjects, such as life in the favelas, suffering, and anguish, but some time ago he made an explicit decision to devote his efforts to images that give him joy.

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Yet, there is also a political side to Pereira’s art, having to do with the relationship between humans and nature. It bears noting that the Atlantic forest is one of the world’s most endangered biomes due to deforestation and human activity (only 7.3 % or the original area is currently preserved). In the biome’s rich biodiversity, bromeliads play an important role. Santídio Pereira is particularly concerned with the relationship between Brazil’s flora and its national culture, and with Brazil’s biomes; for him, the country’s greatest riches are in nature.

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Color is another distinctive characteristic of Pereira’s art, one that infuses each work with great vitality. With an intense palette of bold colors, derived from the tropical light of his childhood, these works are filled with the yellows, greens, blues and reds of the tropical region. These colors, which are subjective and don’t exist in exact correspondence with the real world, signal the light of every place where the artist has lived. Each place has its own light and color; this provides Pereira with infinite possibilities.

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Santídio Pereira was born and spent his early childhood in Curral Comprido, a small town in Brazil’s Northeast region, in the state of Puauí. His entire body of work emanates from this early experience of close contact with nature in an open, vast, unbound space.

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Xippas’ Paris location will hold an exhibition curated by Manuel Neves from mid-October through the end of the year, where new audiences will be able to enjoy Santídio Pereira’s work and the objects he has been developing for years.