Ariano Suassuna

Ariano Vilar Suassuna was born on June 16, 1927 in the city of Paraíba, now João Pessoa, at the time when his father, João Suassuna, was president of Paraíba State. When his father left office, the family moved to the backlands of Paraíba, where Ariano spent most of his childhood, in the towns of Sousa and Taperoa. In 1943 Ariano and his family moved to Recife, where he lived until his death in 2014. Ariano was married to D. Zélia de Andrade Lima, with whom he had six children. Although he is best known as a novelist, playwright and poet, Ariano Suassuna was also a great plastic artist, and it is to this facet of the great master that we dedicate this publication.

Ariano Suassuna has always been a great defender and disseminator of popular Brazilian culture. Together with a group of artists and writers, he founded in 1970 in Recife the Armorial Movement, which had as its objectives the construction and enhancement of an essentially Brazilian erudite art, based on elements of popular culture of the Northeast. [...] The Brazilian Armorial Art is that which has as its main common trait the connection with the magical spirit of the "pamphlets" of the Northeastern popular novels (Literatura de Cordel), with the music of the viola, rabeca or fife which accompany their "songs", and with the woodcuttings which illustrate their covers, as well as with the spirit and form of the popular arts and shows related to these same novels [...], wrote Ariano in 1975. According to the master, the term armorial referred to "a set of insignias, coats of arms, banners and flags of a people, heraldry is a much more popular art than anything else". Thus, the Armorial Movement signified the desire to connect with these heraldic Brazilian cultural roots. The Movement valued painting, music, literature, ceramics, dance, sculpture, theatre, engraving, cinema, among others. In this context, Master Ariano contributed, not only as an idealizer of the movement and promoter of these artistic manifestations, but also as one of these artists, especially in literature, engraving, painting and theatre.

Ariano's plastic art started together with his literature. The master used to illustrate the pages of his manuscripts with floral motifs, fantastic figures, among others, which covered the margins of the paper in a kind of frame for the text. In the novels The Stone of the Kingdom and The Prince of the Blood of Vai-e-volta, he decided to illustrate the books himself. Unlike traditional engravings, those in his novels play a structural role in the story and are usually signed by one of the characters. With the Armorial Movement, Ariano combined illumination (a technique practised in the Middle Ages, which consisted of a decorative painting applied to the capital letters of medieval parchment codices) with engraving, thus creating illuminogravure, a kind of "visual poetry". Images of knights, animals, coats of arms, flags, crosses mixed with the poetry of the Master and of other great Brazilian poets, such as Augusto dos Anjos.

When making illuminogravures, Ariano first produced a matrix with his illustrations combined with handwritten poems, made in India ink on paper. From there he would make offset copies in a print shop and then manually colour the drawings with gouache, oil and/or watercolour ink. The text was written in letters that resembled cattle brands made with hot iron. Based on these marks Ariano developed a typographic work linked to his countryside heraldry: the Armorial Alphabet.

Por: Sala Galeria