Mestre Didi

For Mestre Didi, these works are a mythical reality, representing a place of exaltation and bonding with the sacred. The importance of verticality and symmetry show the values of aesthetic nature, totem forms climbing to the infinite, in a constant search to connect with the sacred, with the spiritual world, which confirms the impossibility of separating the artist from the high-priest and from his religion. This connectivity is part of the African vision of the world and, thus, of their ancestors. For them everything is connected: man, life, death, forces of nature. Everything is related to the workings of the cosmos and one doesn´t act without the other.

The importance and uniqueness of Mestre Didi´s work is triggered by the anthropophagy of African culture in order to create a singularly Brazilian oeuvre. Just as Tarsila do Amaral did in relation to Indigenous culture, Didi later came to remind us of the Brazilian plurality and the different possibilities of inspiring models for the creation and re-creation of something authentic, unique and original, supported by one of the cultures that gave origin to Brazil. Oswald de Andrade, in his manifest, stated that: “only anthropophagy unites us”.