Jadielson Dos Santos Lima

Branco was born in 1987 in the Alagoan city of Penedo

Growing up with his grandfather, he has worked since childhood in the fields, in an environment where nature is anything but generous, where the dry also wilts cacti and punishes men and animals, where for months and months you survive with a few drops of muddy water.

His dream was to go south and meet his mother who had left in search of work when he was still very young. He manages to leave and arrive in Sao Paulo when he was 15 and meets his mother who lives with other children in the poor suburbs of the great metropolis.

One of the stepbrothers, who works as a valet parking in a luxurious São Paulo neighbourhood convinces him to take on the same job. During his time as a parking attendant on Oscar Freire street, an artist who has been working on that street for 30 years notices him.

This is Tonico Mendonça, who sees him and invites him to work with him in his frame workshop. Branco thus begins his first contact with the canvases. In moments of little work, he wants to go back to the street but Tonico with intuition keeps him between the brushes.

Tonico immediately noticed the boy's immense pleasure when he paints, his agility with the brush denotes an irrepressible desire to express himself through images, drawings and symbols. A kind of personal and unique handwriting.

Tonico's home soon becomes his and in the same space between the shop and the house, a corner with an old table becomes his atelier. It was in 2009 when Branco painted the first canvas.

Branco had never before had any kind of creative experience. In this sense, he continues to be a talent in the raw state, he lives and creates his paintings artistically isolated from what happens in the world of art. From this context comes the particularly individual character of his work, so unique that it is difficult to classify it.

He cannot be defined as a popular artist, that is, those artists who work in the field of craftsmanship whose works, always figurative, are linked to aspects of the external reality in which they live. The only reality that can be found in Branco's canvases is internal, it belongs to his mental universe, which manifests itself above all through invented figures, abstract shapes, graphics that recall Mirò, sketches similar to those of the Cobra Group, images with an archetypal flavour, similar to those in the caves of prehistoric populations.

If it is true that his very first canvases had something childish, of a colourful fantasy, it leaps to the eye that subsequently he sets off towards a disordered invention, not at all measured, at times tremulous, excessive and at times dramatic, definitely far from the delicate beauty of the naive. That's what we see in his paintings today: more war (in form) than peace.

The only title we can give him is that of the spontaneous artist, a term that defines a way of being and the relationship he maintains with his creations. No explanation can be obtained from him on the origins and meaning of his iconography, he does not know what to say, he cannot convert any aspect of an experience of a unique and mysterious life into words. His is a real way of communicating, the communication that he reads and writes through spontaneous images and symbols.

It is he who says that his paintings are born from a movement of the hand, or rather from a brush that spontaneously flows on the canvas, as when one of us spontaneously writes a text, without thinking if not the spaces and the colour of the pen used. His drawings are a sort of spontaneous iconographic alphabet that can only be deciphered by the most sensitive people who see in the images something that has no pretensions, that does not need the effort to be understood, that transcends the real to situate itself in the unconscious of us all.

Its beauty, the attractive force and the unequivocal aesthetic experience that Branco's paintings provoke a free and immediate response to the sensitivity of each of us. Branco serves to teach us to review the universe around us with new eyes.

Olivio Tavares de Araujo