Wood - 11.02 x 7.87 x 32.28 in (28 x 20 x 82 cm)

Biography
José Bezerra was born in 1952 in the city of Buíque, in the state of Pernambuco, where the hinterland borders on the transition region known as "agreste". Bezerra was a farm worker, a jockey at improvised horse races, and so many other activities which being poor requires. He killed animals for food, felled trees to make firewood, things that now make him unhappy and which he is always trying to atone through his works of art. Some years ago, Bezerra had a dream in which he was called to carry out the work he does nowadays. He should become an artist. From that point onwards, he started to look at the wood that surrounded him, something he had never done before, to make interventions on them. Bezerra does not sculpt in a traditional manner of acting upon a block of wood to establish a defined form. He tries to envision a figure which is already insinuated in the wood - normally the wood of the umburana tree (Amburana cearensis) with its trunk, branches and roots - and bring them to the surface with the gross intervention using a hunting knife, a rasp, a chisel and a wood saw. For him, it is a case of achieving a certain figure while, at the same time, maintain his association with the raw wood he set out from and the instruments and gestures that have acted upon it. As the artist says, "it [wood] takes a lesson from us, and we also take a lesson from wood". This decision gives his sculptures an uncommon intensity. Usually Bezerra works with twisted logs, typical of the local vegetation, like the umburana. This irregular aspect, slowly bringing together the copperplates that mould it, produces a notable result. The oscillating definitions of the figures blend in with the twistedness of the wood, and this relationship means we can see shapes that seem to struggle to emerge, in the midst of the tussle between plant materials, on the one hand, and the rough and parsimonious sculpture interventions, on the other. His animals, bodies and faces do not have the sweetness of much of what is termed Popular Art, made of affection for and familiarity with the materials, which come out from his proximity with handicrafts and also the need to get the most out of wood, clay or stone through the use of rudimentary techniques. On the contrary, the acts of doing and appearing seem to mutually estrange themselves, even though they may reach unity at the end of the process. In addition, the light strokes with a carving knife intensify the invasive aspect, on bringing together the gesture that intervened in the trunk and its natural configuration. If the simplicity and conciseness present in many of José Bezerra's sculptures have a Brancusian element, the tensions that cut across them definitely moves them away from the lines of the Romanian artist. The deformations, and the stressful, and distressing expression of José Bezerra's sculptures often border on the comical, another aspect always present in his work. When he talks about his artwork - and José Bezerra also composes music, the artist emphasizes the role of imagination in what he carried out. Thus, the importance that he assigns to the act of seeing pictures in trunks and trees which he finds around his farm finds in imagination an element which moves his pieces away from simple realism, of which it transports any fantasies that may pass through his head to the clouds in the sky. For José Bezerra the act of seeing means opening the natural material, wood, to new possibilities that push it away from a lazy self-identity, as also a merely instrumental use. The summary action upon wood - which often has a division into facts which reminds one of the strokes of Cézanne -, the constant memory of its vegetable origin, and also the intensity of its figures give the work an appearance of an incomplete and unfinished movement, as if there was an aspiration to a continuity which would take it beyond its contours.