Elias para inglês conhecer mais

                                                           ELIAS ANDRADE

                                                                                       

   Real culture always grows out of consonance with nature, from which we have come and to which we will go back, whether we admit it or not.

   Elias Andrade, more than anyone else, personifies the artist perfectly integrated into his environment, that he, by the way, defends ardently.

   Living in the paradisiac surroundinge of the Ponta do Sambaqui, fishing an arm of the Ratones River or picking up oysters on the seashore rocks, the artist experiences this plenitude from which he draws inspiration for an art viscerally attached to his ecological manner of life.

   Contrary to the naive ones that fabricate souvenire for tourists, Elias is an artist who does not make concessions, who paints and creates to meet his own expression needs, and does it very coherently in his proposals.

   Developing drawing since the beginning of the career, its lines today are loose and assured, interwoven with precise brushes and dabs of strong, sensual colors.

   His painting does not narrate.  Subjects: mermaids, seascapes, public celebrations, are not but the starting point. The artist, with a broad ease, frees himself from them and creates a painting independent, full of liveliness and energy.

   Besides painting, Elias" fertile restlessness has looked for new ways to express himself. The result is a series  of objectos made out of wreckage foun in the sea. Rudders or pieces of bows receive a pictorial handling, becoming objects of extreme modernity.

   Elias Andrade, the ' Índio" (Indian), as he is also known, is original not only in his works. The way he often exibits them is absolutely special: in natural surroundings, as among the pitangueiras on the Ponta do Sambaqui ( a wood of Surinam cherry tree on a headland) or in historical forts of the Ilha de Santa Catarina, always concerned about taking art where people are. The most amazing of his exhibitions was in the Ratones River, with the pictures sustained by bamboos. Visitors were carried in boats, and the 'floating' exhibition had another purpose as well: to denounce the filling up with earth of part of river so as possible a tourist undertaking.

   All the features that compose Elias' work, together with his social concerns (rare in most of our artists), make him unique in the artistic production of this State.

                                                                                       JOÃO OTÁVIO NEVES  FILHO               

                                                                        Member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics 

                                                                         and the International Association os Art Critics