Dear readers,
Yesterday I showed my students a documentary about the work of Manoel de Barros and, while (re)watching it, I began to notice the similarities between him and Sérgio Medeiros. Both work with simplicity and spontaneity, allowing poetry to reveal to the reader the purest form of its essence: art. Neither Barros nor Medeiros is bound by rigid concepts or the need for verisimilitude. What they do is draw from nature and human experience as raw material to transform into poetry—whether in words or in lines.
Manoel de Barros rescues childhood memories that unfold into free verses, without rhyme or meter, unconcerned with form, yet filled with the tenderness of words. Sérgio Medeiros, in turn, creates drawings and poems that engage in dialogue with nature and the Indigenous universe, revealing subtle perceptions of cultures so often silenced.
If Barros finds in the Pantanal a fertile territory for his imagination, Medeiros projects onto paper images that expand our perception of the world. Both, in their own way, invite us to look at the simple with more delicacy and to recognize the poetry hidden in everyday life.
After all, the greatness of art may lie precisely in what seems small: in the memory of a childhood, in the delicacy of a line, or in a word that is born unpretentiously yet touches us deeply.
"um rio quando está dando em peixes ele me coisa, ele me rã, ele me árvore" ( BARROS, O livro das Ignorãças. 1993).
Image taken from the book" Dicionário de Hieróglifos
Source: MEDEIROS, 2020, p.36
Image taken from the book" Dicionário de Hieróglifos
Source: MEDEIROS, 2020, p.17