Comment biography 03/2009
Metalworking, in which he got started at age twelve as an apprentice goldsmith and watchmaker, was the springboard from where Caetano Dias would dive, after nearly two decades, into the world of art. At twenty-nine years of age, the artist born in the small village of Bonfim da Feira, in the municipality of Feira de Santana, left everything behind—a job as a designer at a company in Camaçari and a language course at the Catholic University of Salvador—to live off his creations alone.
The gateway to this new life came up in 1988, when Dias entered the Interferência urban interference group, whose other members included Donizete Lima, Mazzola, Paulo Portela, Ademir Tuy, and Carlos Rodrigues. The activity reached an end “after three or four years,” says the author from Bahia, and the graffiti he used to do at public spaces in the capital of Bahia gave way to personal experimentations, basically centered around the issue of the body and religiosity, and started reaching into the fields of painting and photography.
“It is worth noting that making art at that particular time in Salvador was extremely difficult. Information on what was being produced around the world then did not arrive here. I had no background in the area, therefore I had to build my entire process as a self-taught artist, especially through information exchange and the construction of a common knowledge inside the Interferência group and with other friends, whom I had met after that turning point. And no matter what happened, I was sure about what I wanted: art,” Dias explains.
From the year 2000 onwards, his range of supports and languages became broader, and Dias also began making sculptures, videos, and installations. Some of this work appeared in exhibitions such as Estratégias para a perda de sentido, held at Paço das Artes, the Marilia Razuk Galeria de Arte, in São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, and the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and 2003. His creations also featured at events such as the 1st Latin American Film Festival in São Paulo (2006) and exhibition Paisagens (2008), held at the Reina Sofía museum, in Madrid.
More recently, the artist’s work has directly touched upon social realities that he is very familiar with: life in the poorer areas of the state of Bahia, the small private universes of the regular citizen, in his constant transit between the harshness and lyricism of daily life. One such example is Canto doce pequeno labirinto (2006), a structure made from melted sugar and installed at the Calçada railway station, in Salvador. Dias entered the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2007) with a recording of the work, which won him an award from the Videobrasil Residency Programme.
Also in Zilomag (2006), urban surroundings provide not only the settings, but also the raw material for his creation. Using construction debris, the author collectively produced, with help from inhabitants of neighborhoods in the outskirts of the capital of Bahia, a solid block of cement and wood. The object, created for playful purposes, also became a symbol of its builders’ way of life. “The function ... was putting together something that would mirror the reality of the place, and then have the people play with their own reality,” explains the artist.
Chance is another element that is never out of sight in the real-life fables devised by Dias. In Uma (2005), through the author’s lenses, the accidental recording of a couple having sex on the beach on a sunny Sunday became a recording of sensations and experiences of dreams, disillusions, waiting, and hoping. “The people or situations featured in my work attempt to discuss how to be in such an adverse world, but I try and depict all of that with some sweetness.”
Dias’ work is part of collections owned by institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, in Brasília, Casa de las Américas, in Cuba, the museums of modern art of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, the Afro Brasil museum, in São Paulo, and the Berardo Museum, in Lisbon, Portugal, among others.
“I come from the interior of the state of Bahia, where the living conditions are very bad. I have always seen all of that adversity really up close,” says the artist. “I guess I have become a voyeur of the state of things, and I believe that it ended up reflecting on my poetics.”