Composições grotescas: a cultura popular nas pinturas de Sante Scaldaferri

Abstract

The research aims to investigate the popular cultural compositions in the paintings of the Bahian expressionist Sante Scaldaferri. In order to do so, the research focuses on this artist’s most emblematic paintings, which present a creative reading of popular manifestations, his most representative characters and objects, whose pictorial narrative is built in the face of a situation of institutional rupture in 1964. Sante expresses a grotesque aesthetic of popular court, placing the brush strokes around experiences devoid of socially established standards, lowering circumstances attributed to the celestial plane to the material plane, in a way that magical, fantastic and extraordinary experiences burst out as part of the reality of the popular culture. The research focuses on three phases of Sante Scaldaferri’s paintings, covering the period from 1964 to 1988, noticing the extent to which expressions of popular culture are accompanied by simbolic reactions about Brazilian military dictatorship. Each phase carries in itself characteristic traits under the protagonism of the “ex-votos”, through which the set of works presents a movement of aesthetic transformation of a material that in its own constitution evokes the fulfillment of a miracle. The transmutation of an “in natura” votive material for the humanization of its forms has connection with Brazil’s social and political reality during the military regime.