Xippas is pleased to announce Da mata ao morro, the first solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Santídio Pereira in its Punta del Este gallery. Later this year, the gallery will present a solo show of Santídio Pereira in its parisian space.
Born in Curral Comprido, a small village in the northeast of Brazil, Santídio Pereira migrated to São Paulo as a child and soon joined Instituto Acaia, a private non-profit NGO that assists children and adolescents, where he also worked. It was at the age of eight, through the workshops at Ateliescola Acaia that Santídio began his artistic practice. The images from personal memories, preserved since his childhood, both from his homeland and from later experiences, serve today as guidelines in his work.
The woodcut tecniques awoke the artists’s first interest, that he developed later in his own working method, which he calls “incision, cut and fitting”, consisting in the combination of several cut layers of wooden pannels, which intertwin in a jigsaw puzzle. Over time, the materiality, also worked in his ink on paper pieces, became one of the main directions of Santídio’s practice that has been guiding his artistic production up to day.
“The artist’s journey is unlike an explorer who “discovers” the place and things, who takes notes, who represents by approaching face-to-face reality. The artists journey is a lived journey, a walk through memory, love and childhood, a meeting of joy with these places with this fauna and flora, in time, and diluted or “decanted”, as the artist would say, by the experience and expressed as signs of the grandeur of what is there. Nature becomes a sign, something to be revered: the hills, the plants and the birds.
Ricardo Sardenberg, curator.
Santídio Pereira was born in 1996 in Curral Comprido, Estado do Piauí, Brazil. He lives and works in Sao Paulo.
He participated in numerous exhibitions at major Brazilian and international institutions such as Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM-SP); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; Power Station of Art in Shanghai; and recently Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil dedicated him a personal exhibition.
His work is part of renown collections, such as the Colección Cisneros, USA; SESC Art Collection, São Paulo; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, among many others.
