Writing about Rui Santana and his paintings is an exercise in which I indulge with great pleasure, even being aware of all the risks. His canvases boast a text of their own that does not belong in the realm of the word, of which my job’s raw material is comprised. Standing before the stretched canvases – all painted and colored – and ready for the exhibition, I give in to the temptation of the verbs, and then look for rescue among adjectives. Realizing the mistake, I retreat.I try to unite the images with the artist’s voice, which, in its turn, evades the questions. His work speaks for itself and renders introductions unnecessary.

In attempting to restrain my narrative, I seek shelter in words not my own, appropriated from clippings documenting the course of the artist’s career. For help, I turn to the masters of cultural journalism and art critics in Minas: Celma Alvim, Mari’stella Tristão, Moacyr Laterza, Walter Sebastião, José Márcio de Barros and Luiz Edmundo Alves.

I reach for inspiration initially from Celma Alvim, who was overwhelmed by the painter’s boldness in 1987. In a sensitive and poetic text, she welcomes the inventiveness of Rui Santana, who uses art to prove that “the head cannot contain the mind”, moved by the need to create and innovate. “The extreme sensitivity of the young artist launches onto the canvas a certain disalignment of colors and shapes, proof beyond doubt of the freedom that courts every aspect of his creative process”.

Eighteen years on, the disalignment in colors and shapes remain. The freedom is revealed in the layering of tones: no commitments to the start, much less to the end. The current canvases reveal a frenetic dance of organic designs. The artist releases a torrent of elements inspired by the nature found in Rio Acima, the town in which he settled both his home and studio. Photographed by the retinas of the artist, flowers and leaves surge onto the canvas, painting by painting, borne by the waters’ song that renews and enchants.

Upon viewing the paintings, eyes gaze in captivity and share in the artist’s pleasure. This has always been the idea for Rui Santana, a ritual necessary for invention, so well espoused by critic José Márcio de Barros, in 1988, when he wrote of his work ”produced with a boldness that either hints at or fully unveils the frenzied act of creation”, inviting us to become “accomplices of this grand and serious game of being expressive, of enjoying the pleasures of creation”.

In this show, the artist’s orgasm is an explosion of colors that unveils a garden of his own, authorial and powerful. Rui’s paintings overwhelm us, fill the eyes and the soul. A lover of the frenzy of big cities, Rui plunges into the rejuvenating peace of the landscape, so close to Belo Horizonte – and so seemingly distant, untouchable, almost sacred. He is not immune to only the whims of the weather, which never cease, even on Rui’s canvases: it’s spring, summer, autumn and winter. It’s in the beholder’s eyes.

Neither has the ecstasy withered with maturity, nor has the restlessness of the artist’s mind diminished. Rui feels the rush and wishes to strip bare his feelings. His work “is the evasiveness of emotion, of the remarkable spirituality he bears. The act of painting led by the unconscious, the gesture in accelerated rhythm, dynamic in the eloquence of freedom”, describes Mari’stella Tristão in a 1988 clipping.

Today’s paintings allude to the desire to escape the common place and create incessantly. Alone or in good company, as in the times of the Azar Group. Alongside Gabriela Demarco, Gilberto de Abreu and Orlando Castaño, Santana knew how to “articulate the disperse, disperse the articulate, approach and see the rhythm of all the conflicts and all the possibilities. Be, eternally, this moment full of enigmas, problem for the mythologies of the past and a tease of the future. Nothing new, everything new”, comments Walter Sebastião, in the 1991 exhibition catalogue, in Brazil and in Chile.

What marks Rui Santana as different is perhaps the way he sees the world and communicates with his environment, be it in Paris or in a hamlet in Minas, surrounded by woods and waterfalls. “Rui is an artisan, an artifice, an artist. He is all this because he is first and foremost a great aesthetic, who knows how to converse lovingly with the things of this world”, said Moacyr Laterza in 1997.

The intense dialogue between the artist and his surroundings is the common thread throughout this collection of works. To present them, I borrowed the words of Luiz Edmundo Alves, taken from the invitation to the last show. He expressed the transformative capacity of the artist: “a driving force that transforms undulating scribbles into branches; sketches, into leaves; drops of paint, into flowers and, finally, everything, into art”.

Andréa Vieira
Journalist
October, 2004