Lot 15: Cícero Dias (Brazilian 1907-2003)

Cícero Dias (Brazilian 1907-2003)
Vaso de flores
signed 'Cicero Dias' (lower left)
oil on canvas
21¾ x 18 1/8 in. (55.2 x 46.3 cm.)
Painted circa 1959.

Acquired from the artist.
Joaquim Guilherme da Silveira collection, Rio de Janeiro.

One of Pernambuco's most beloved artists, Cícero Dias paid expressive homage to his native Brazil over the course of his career, persistently cycling back to the regional idylls and euphoric colors remembered from his youth. Born in Recife, Dias moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1925 and became a part of Brazil's surging modern art movement, led by the poet Oswald de Andrade and painters Anita Malfatti and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. From the beginning, he showed "a will to integrate himself into the process of renewal and updating of Brazilian art," Roberto Pontual has remarked, along with a commitment to "the project of holding on to his region and the specific circumstances of his birth in order to reencounter, among lyricism and childhood, the softer memory of dreams, in the landscape of Recife or Olinda."(1) In 1937 Dias traveled to Paris, where he would spend the remainder of his career, and was soon drawn into the orbit of the Surrealists and later of the group Espace, which championed geometric abstraction during the 1950s. Yet by the time of his retrospective at the 1965 São Paulo Biennial, Dias had returned to lushly figurative art, introducing folkloric and rural imagery drawn on costumbrista scenes of everyday life.

The present work belongs to the series of portraits and dream-like landscapes that Dias painted in the 1960s in an evocatively regional, tropical style. These works mark the artist's thematic return to the mythic tableaux of his native Pernambuco, and the colorfully re-imagined scenes suggest a powerful feeling of nostalgia for the rustic paradise of his past. Awash in warm colors of salmon pink and cerulean blue, this work portrays a lively town square, peopled with families and young couples and surrounded by a row of exuberantly colored homes and gracefully overhanging palms. The painting suggests a slightly elevated vantage point onto the square; we glimpse the idyllic scene from an ornamental balcony hidden from view by a splendid bouquet of flowers, a richly symbolic still life that becomes the centerpiece of the image.

Flowers abound in Dias's paintings, lending a succulent splash of color and serene repose to his sentimental scenes of Pernambuco's past. Noting the etymological associations of the word bouquet, Mário Hélio Gomes de Lima has remarked that these teeming floral arrangements hark back to the original Edenic paradise, rife with abundant flora and consummate life. In this way, the regionalism of Dias's painting is made universal, and his lyrical figuration is distilled as "a mythic place in which time stands still, and in which figures are bathed in colors immensely calm and warm," culled from the "ever more luminous and decorative palette of the painter."(2) An image of fecundity and ebullient color, the bouquet that foregrounds the present work stands as an idyllic celebration of Dias's local roots and their paradisal universality.

1) R. Pontual, quoted in Christine Frérot, "Cícero Dias: The 1920s - The Brazil Years," Art Nexus 4, no. 58, September-November 2005, 107.
2) M. H. Gomes de Lima, "Um novo jardim das delícias," in Cícero Dias: oito décadas de pintura, Curitiba: Museu Oscar Niemeyer, 2006, 226.