Miguel dos Santos

1944, Caruaru (PE).

He has lived in João Pessoa since 1960. Identifying Miguel dos Santos’ art with an entire specific cultural reality, writer Adriano dos Suassuna said: 'The northeasterners are taking their creative work ever further forward in an increasingly active and more profound manner, with closer links to Brazilian culture. Best of all, however, is the fact that writers or artists like Miguel dos Santos, to name but one case, are not content to duplicate what the Regionalists and Modernists did. They are moving forward, opening new roads or taking others in a different direction. As may be seeing in the work of Miguel dos Santos, the main difference between us, today’s northeastern writers and painters, and our predecessors, our unique characteristic, is the link with the magic realism of the popular northeastern story-teller. Magic Realism – Brazilian, northeastern, rooted in the people – and not surrealism. Look closely and you will see that there is a fairly marked difference between the surrealist painters, or those connected to the forerunners of surrealism, and a painter such as Miguel dos Santos, whose popular appeal and very Brazilian powers are the same as those of the leaflets and wood-engravings of the popular northeastern story-teller. It is true that I am biased because I belong to the same lineage as Miguel dos Santos or Gilvan Samico, both in my poetry and stage plays, and in my novel A Pedra do Reino. But if I must be enthusiastic about what really moves me – and the painting of Miguel dos Santos really does, with his oil paintings and pottery peopled with strange beasts, dragons, metamorphoses, devil-possessed dogs, saints, mythical beasts and demons. His works are connected to the story-teller, and for this reason so expressive of the tragically fatalistic posture, cruelly joyful and mythically true, that the Brazilian people take before reality.' With him, with Espindola, with Pindaro Castello Branco, with João Câmara and Siron, with various other young masters of dream (or nightmare) based popular painting, Brazil’s main trend in painting is formed at the moment of a restless resistance. In parallel, there are the constructivists, such as Rubem Valentim and even the neo-informalists, such as Loio Pérsio. The sum of all this, and much more, is defined in the multiple version of our state of creation which is broad and uses an accurate idiom to cover the diversification of world trend in contemporary art.

ONE-MAM EXHIBITIONS:

1968 – Cultural Department of the Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa (PB);

1970 – Nega Fulô Gallery, Recife (PE);

1971 – Janelas Verdes Gallery, João Pessoa (PB);

1972 – Bonino Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (RJ);

1975 – Bonino Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (RJ);

1976 – Picasso Gallery, Recife (PE);

1978 – Bonino Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (RJ);

1980 – Bonino Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (RJ);

MAIN GROUP EXHIBITIONS:

1970 – Rosário Gallery, Recife (PE);

1972 – Palácio dos Arcos, Brasília (DF);

1973 – SNAM, Rio de Janeiro (RJ);

1973 – Images du Brésil, Brussels (Belgium);

1977 – 2nd World Festival of Black Art (Nigeria)

1977 – 14th São Paulo Biennial (SP);

1980 – MASP, São Paulo (SP).

Dictionary of Brazilian Painters, 1997, Walmir Ayala.