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Lucena Pires

"My relationship with art in childhood is perhaps summarized in the games that friends and I were capable of creating and experimenting with, small drawings and paintings. I had always felt a longing for things related to culture and their many expressions. However, my first contact with sculpture was around 20 years of age, more precisely, in 1994.

"I lived in a normal family atmosphere, like any other, with my parents motivating my studies, but always aimed toward conventional careers. Therefore, I was trained as technician in electronics and I worked with several companies, ending up in Buenos Aires, Argentina with one of them. There I had an access to a wider and more diverse cultural universe than I could have had at that time in Rio de Janeiro. It was there, too, where I fell in love and married an Argentine woman. I began the first year of electronic engineering and was also able start a sculpture workshop in a cultural center close to my house.

"This experience prepared me for an awakening from a sleep, not deep but heavy, of living without sculpture. At the end of that year, I left engineering and took the entrance exam for the school of fine arts. After this, the whole wonderful universe of art opened up so that I could experience the essence of this path in life, and here I am sampling the sweet and the bitter with great pleasure.

"For my family, abandoning my well-founded career as a technician and engineer was madness, but time is implacable and shows what is right and wrong along the way. In this case, my choice was very good. Today, the family respects this change of direction and gives me all the support that I need.

"I studied at the National School of Bellas Artes Prilidiano Puerreidon, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the same time, I studied with well-known artists in Buenos Aires to better understand the paths and the possibilities of art. My passage through art school gave me an immense universe of like-minded people, with whom I enjoyed sharing discoveries, creating 'madness' and expressive experiences of the highest value for my artistic, cultural and spiritual formation. "One of my first works is of a seated mestizo, a field worker, inspired by a book by Jorge Amado (Seara Vermelha or 'Red Wheatfield'), that I keep for my personal collection. It tells the story of my family and tales of the northeast, the indigenous and the black people, so that the mestizo figure – so common in Brazil's popular universe – appears in a spontaneous and strong way. This was very present in the work and is somehow still present in me today. My art research was, for a long time, on primitive cultures and their artistic expressions, fundamentally African, pre-Hispanic and Polynesian. Today, my work is derivative of these studies, striving to develop a singular aesthetic that is deeply related with the suburb, with Latin America and with the loss of our forest that leads to the loss of our culture, our biodiversity, our multi-cultural society and of our native Americans, who end up as suburbanites.

"Along this fantastic journey – the world of sculpture, where space and its dimensions are part of the great questions we try to compregend – I seek an essence that is lost or perhaps forgotten in humanity's places. I look for the Amerindian, I look for the mestizo, I look for a larger understanding of a whole, to connect the lines of the universe, to understand time and space, to feel the movement, to have the certainty that we are all interconnected. I strive to speak with the earth and to listen to her. On my journey, my companions are the native peoples, the suburbanites, Latin Americans, and the forest that screams in silence. They are the men who believe in the eternal movement of the universe, the discarded ones who return through art to dialogue with society and demonstrate that their noble essence endures despite the scars, the mistreatment, in spite of the dedicated life discarded in the end, forgotten, in a paradox unique to contemporary man who wants to rebuild his values.

"I believe that art is directly linked to something essential in the human being; something that he is experiencing in different ways through his own history and in search of understanding his universe, that allows one to better contemplate a point on blank paper and another point floating in the infinite universe. I think that artistic expression is the special way that each artist relates with his work; it is the dialogue that is built between the artist and the material. From this dialogue, forms, colors, expressions, textures, densities are catalyzed. In this way, the work acquires its own life and character.

"I am very careful with the materials that I use in my compositions; they are essentially recycled. The iron is scraps, the wood from torn down buildings or rescued trunks of the city, fallen trees or pruned or sick trees that are removed. The stones that I use are collected from several areas of the state. A lot of times I use wood and stone rescued from the area where I live today, inside a National Park in the state of Rio de Janeiro, that is only some seven percent of the Atlantic forest that still remains in Brazil. These works are always related with the silent scream of the forest."