Cerqueira Flàvio: Se precisar, conto outra vez

Bronze sculpture is one of the art genres that require specific knowledge and skills from the artist. It bears the weight of references from the history of art and the work of great artists, who over the centuries have built up its repertoire and qualities.

As a work of art that is also indissociable from a monument, bronze sculpture presents a challenge to today’s artist who is seeking to develop a personal artistic language of excellence, attentive to the aspects that drive its sensibility, without losing the medium’s expressive greatness, nor succumbing to its stereotypes.

Flávio Cerqueira has been treading this path for some years now, with a dedicated, daily studio practice, searching through the wealth of his own memories, working with the uneasiness of his reflections on the incongruencies of reality.
The tradition of bronze, its weight and authority, were initially the support that Flávio used to give materiality to the narrative of the awakening of consciousness and the opening of the eyes to the possibilities of existence, in highly lyrical pieces. In his incisive, precise, yet nonetheless delicate work, the metal under the apparent fragility of the porcelain became a metaphor for the nearly present intense absence and for the present moment which is so fleeting it becomes almost eternal.

In recent works, Flávio Cerqueira has extended this challenge to other manifestations of absence, when he discusses history. He does not focus his discussion on his own personal memories, but rather on his astonishment concerning the fading of memories and the maneuvers of forgetfulness. He focused his discussion on the history of Brazil and on the question of the versions, myths, heroes and changes of roles. He does not emphasize the
disappearings and voids, but rather their transformations. He presents characters and their silences. He speaks of the need of the voice and action of those who went away without leaving their footprints. He presents toppled legends.

The artworks shown compose the sequence of this discourse. Not by chance, he has named one of the works Sobre tudo, mas não sobre qualquer coisa [About Everything, but Not about Anything]. His perspective is vast, but with a precise focus. Skillful in the articulation of the word, he chooses titles for his sculptures drawn from colloquial speech, in order to link together his visual thought and establish an immediate connection with the viewer: in Eu te disse… [I Told You] he warns of the danger of burial under the avalanche of information, O glorioso retorno de quem nunca esteve aqui [The Glorious Return of Who Was Never Here], presents the warrior, who is not one, but all in one, and in Amnésia [Amnesia] he alludes to the blankness of forgetting.

And he closes his thought reflecting on the uselessness of the vanities and the certainty that everything will one day end, generously stating that if it is necessary there will be a re-beginning and… “Se precisar, conto outra vez” [If Necessary, I Will Tell You Again].