FLÁVIO CERQUEIRA
“It Had to Happen
(Colonist Head)” 2016
800 kg bronze sculpture, 2.5 meters in diameter
“It had to happen (colonist head)”, made in 2016, gives new meaning to the use of bronze and its relationship with the heroes fabricated by the official history. The head, built in large dimensions, reaching two and a half meters wide, was designed based on the profile of the scouts, honored in several monuments in the city of São Paulo, but whose glories were achieved in a context of quilombola extermination and indigenous enslavement.
Flavio decided to turn the founders of São Paulo into anti-heroes. He “decapitated” the pioneers from the body of history and knocked off one of São Paulo's heads. “It is necessary to analyze history and tell it anew”, the sculptor observes. “Despite the monuments that exist in the city in honor of the scouts, they were barbarians. They exterminated, enslaved the Indians, and annihilated the quilombos.”
“One word other than to wait”. Bronze, 175 x 38 x 49 cm, 2018
Flávio Cerqueira
São Paulo, Brazil, 1983.
He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil
http://flaviocerqueira.com
Flávio Cerqueira has a master’s degree in visual arts from Universidade Estadual Paulista-UNESP. He works with the traditional sculpture process known as lost wax and bronze casting and explores the human figure as the protagonist.
As an artist/storyteller, Cerqueira creates vigorous figurative bronze sculptures that focus on building narratives and representing actions. He portrays his characters in common, universal everyday situations, as in moments of introspection, reflection, concentration, and action. The presence of everyday objects such as mirrors, books, tree trunks, ramps, and stairs create tension with the out-of-scale bronze human figures. These scenarios take place inside the white cube, which acts as a pedestal, an attempt to blur the boundaries between the sculpture and the world and between the work of art and the viewer. His intention is to problematize the relationship between space and spectator. Cerqueira uses sculpture as a tool for capturing an instant, the moment of a fragment of a narrative, where the spectator becomes a co-author in the production of meaning to say that the story has no end, but with several endings, the frontiers between fantasy and reality disappear.
