Masterpieces - Mino

The arrival of passengers from all over the world, who land here to discover, once again, a new world. They arrive by plane and are dressed in whimsical components. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? The Ceará man, riding his little donkey greets and welcomes them. And a trait jumps out: The Ceará man is always looking at the sky. He is always longing for the rain. And always has his arms wide open, signaling our great virtue as a people, our hospitality.

In CEARÁ LÚDICO, I bring all the fantasy elements of our culture to populate the aerial space. Gas lamps, fish, birds, lanterns, the mandacaru, lizards, guitar players, cashews, horsemen, all in winged forms.

Dance, which is inherent to the soul of every people, takes a highly personalized form in Ceará. Men and women boogie and woogie, dragging their feet and giving shape to the humble soundtrack that arose from the local Ceará parties known as forró do pé de serra. Lanterns and kites set flight to decorate the sky, our magical components that embrace lovers all around. As I once wrote: “In Ceará, we take women by the waist, oxen by the tail, and the sun with our hands.” 

In Iracema, even the fish can fly, and the rafts stand out and the hair, black as the wings of the giant cowbird, is revealed on the bird that flies through the bow. She holds the bow with her left hand, but in her right hand, the arrow is broken. The famous arrow of peace, the core theme of the message about the encounter of civilizations. The white man was received with open arms.

This aerial landscape is a whimsical expression, a homage to the act of flying conquered by men. As written by Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
So there we have the unidentified flying objects, the flyers of the future, the new inhabitants of space? But notice how the base is an airport housing the simplest of crafts, the paper plane.
 

In this piece, found on the walls of the Fortaleza Airport and which was commissioned by Fraport, there is a relevant point to be highlighted to excite the eyes of people from Brazil and abroad who are leaving and returning to Ceará. It is that flight is present in all pieces – there are winged figures in all of them. From the very first one, depicting Nossa Senhora da Assunção (Our Lady of the Assumption) ascending to heaven, to the birds that build the frame around Iracema, to all other themes explored. Almost every element is flying, floating, occupying aerial space. Ceará is in full flight, historically and culturally, with everything appearing in full movement.
The Dutch founded Fort Schoonenborch in 1649. Later, in 1654, the Portuguese overran the fort and thus founded the Fortress of Our Lady of the Assumption, which is where the name of the city, Fortaleza (Portuguese for Fortress) comes from.
Our Lady, the patron saint and protector of the city, needed the presence of an accordionist angel, symbolizing the link between her and our Northeastern culture.

The raft, our most significant cultural graphic element, is the clearest explanation of our relationship with the ocean, where we find our daily fish through the hands of the mighty raft men. Nothing is still in this illustration.

Men, fish, birds, waves, sails, everything moves, even the lighthouse (“The old and the new”, as stated by composer Ednardo, the “Eyes of the sea”). Only the sun watches still, but the movement of its beams floods with light all the meandering elements of the picture.

Cordel landscapes are graphic representations of our scenery, where the main component is the cordel-style lines, which I incorporate into my drawing. A homage to the most important element in our design, the cordel art. If our art has a signature, it is in the lines of cordel illustrations. 

A flying machine designed and developed by an engineer called Edmundo, paid for by a man called Evangelista. This is a classic tale of the Brazilian cordel style poetry, transformed into a novel by José Camelo and, previously, by João Melchíades. The peacock set high-reaching flight through a song by the same name written by Ceará singer Ednardo. In this piece, I have him as a central figure, in the sky and above the kites and lanterns and the flying raft, a craft loaded with the elements from Ceará culture.

The herdsman, his riding posture, the fruit from the grasslands, the singing birds, the star-studded sky, the lizards, the school, the village, the church, and the plane high in the sky, in or outbound, signaling the presence of the airport, and the flight, are the central theme of the piece.
The sky comes in stronger, like the nighttime scenery in our country man’s life. His nights have more stars and they enrich his dreams and his imagination. This is the true Ceará man. The native Ceará man, our man of the backlands who “is above all else a strong individual”, as masterfully described by Euclides da Cunha, author of Rebellion in the Backlands, the greatest Brazilian literary work.
 

In this sun, we find cultural and historic components illuminated by the understanding that we are inhabitants of the land of light. Our natural and cultural landscape, ruled by the simplicity of our semi-arid climate. And our history is highlighted at every moment we struggled for the love of freedom. Hence the title, Land of Light. In the State of Ceará, we wish to be free. In the State of Ceará, we do not accept the embarking or disembarking of slaves. That is the tradition we inherited, the legacy of ancestral generations. 

The sun, everyone’s great brother, our great star that guarantees the summer that our visitors from the cold parts of the world so long for. Here the sun presents itself as an enormous mandala, where drawings move through their divergent positions and without an exact geometry of precise measurements, but done by hand, as is the popular art from Ceará.