Veio Cicero Alves Dos Santos

Cicero Alves dos Santos (Nossa Senhora da Glória, Sergipe, 1947), better known as VÉIO. Sculptor. He earns from other children the nickname Véio for liking to listen to the conversations of the elders. The fascination for stories and legends of the countryside culture follows the artist all his life. These stories form the basis of his work and of his relationship with the world. In the neighbouring town of Feira Nova (Sergipe), at Sítio Soarte, he created the Museu do Sertão, bringing together a collection of 17,000 works that recount the ways of life and production of the sertanejo and preserve the popular culture of the region. "I don't copy like a parrot", says Véio, who never studied art, nor has any masters, but has always been dedicated to it. As a boy, in the breaks between his work in the fields, he moulds small figures with beeswax. Considering this activity as "playing with dolls", he dismantles the sculptures when an adult approaches. With time, she abandons wax and adopts wood as raw material. But he does not cut down trees to get it. On the contrary: his preservationist instinct leads him to acquire the last stretch of virgin forest in the region. "I give life to what is already dead", he says1. With a strong creative impulse, he dedicated himself exclusively to his sculptures, a decision strangely received by his family and acquaintances. He opts for an austere life and is proud of never working for others and refuses to sell his work when he believes the buyer does not value it. In other words, he never compromises his art to ensure survival, nor does he consider his artistic work as a mere means of livelihood. The sculptor is one of those chosen by the Itaú Cultural 30 Years Prize, held in 2017, to highlight artists who impact the Brazilian cultural scene in recent decades. With a clear and fertile working method, he separates his works into two groups. "The larger, colourful pieces are showy, they speak loudly. They are visible from a distance, creating clearings around them, even when crowded, as happens in his warehouse, workshop and museum. The smaller ones, on the other hand, which preserve the texture of raw wood, are discreet, they speak softly", summarise Carlos Augusto Calil (1951) and Agnaldo Farias (1955), curators of the artist's retrospective held in 2018 at Itaú Cultural2. The larger works are produced from "open trunks", as Véio calls the pieces of wood whose angles and shapes suggest the path to follow. To them he adds industrial colours, vibrant and intense, which give coherence to the sculptures and, according to the critic Rodrigo Naves (1955), generate a "pop effect". These anthropomorphic figures, which spring from the artist's imagination when he comes into contact with the piece being carved, can hardly be reduced to popular art. According to the critic Ronaldo Brito (1949), Véio's works flee from the mimetic virtuosity characteristic of this type of production to approach questions proper to modern and contemporary art3. Besides the restraint of gesture and the impacting colours, these works question the very notion of space in art. Véio distributes his strange figures around the site as if they were inhabitants of the place and refers to them as bearers of history and life. But the appearance of these sculptures transmutes easily, depending on the place and the position in which they are located. "Lying down, she was asking for help; standing up, she wanted to hug me "4, explains the artist when talking about the sensations that the original wood transmits to him and that, in a certain way, are preserved in the final piece. In the second group are the carvings of the "closed woods", as Véio calls the less suggestive trunks, straighter and more suitable for carvings that are more imaginative, detailed and closer to the real world. These works are smaller, sometimes the size of a match-pick head. The difference in size, however, does not seem important to the artist: the small pieces also belong to the world of narrative and are like anecdotes told by the artist. What I want "is to show to art lovers that art is measured neither by size nor by weight". What matters is "its feeling, its form of expression". Some themes are recurrent: domestic scenes, with mothers and their children, the toil of artisans and countrymen, the neglect of culture and the impotent solitude of the Indians. Véio also opens up to the torrent of myths, legends of the northeastern culture and enchants the public with his mixture of fantasy and dexterity. In the series Os Cão do Meu Inferno (The Hounds of My Hell), he portrays endearing beings in an intense black tone. He also portrays clowns and recreates the narratives and the imaginary of the illiterate people, who have listened enraptured since they were children VÉIO . In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: . Accessed on: 05 May 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7

Por: Sala Rússia