Title: Eu Clides Self Portrait #177
Year: 2021
Size: 60x80cm
Technique: Mixed Technique
Description
Born from an artistic project, Eu_Clides comes to life beyond an idea. It turns into images and sensations. At first, it tries to expose all the faces of the personality of its creator. But in a second moment, it reveals its own faces, like a creature that goes beyond who created it. As a support, the foundation of the idea, Eu_Clides, is born through its uncomfortable biography, as if this were the clay with which it was molded. Eu_Clides was born in a quiet city in the interior of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, with few inhabitants. Mostly elderly. Young people, for lack of perspective, moved to big cities, looking for opportunities and a more active social life. At the age of 8, his father Eu_Gênio died of a massive heart attack, which suddenly meant that Eu_Clides had to take care of the old, dusty and almost never visited family mirror store. There he spent almost all day, just seeing his face, reflected and distorted in hundreds of old mirrors scattered around the store. His mother, Dolores, was suffering from a psychiatric disorder, which made it impossible to take care of the store and even to take care of Eu_Clides. His only way of communicating with the world was through his paintings. Sitting at her table, she floated in her own world of colors, lines and textures. By her works, she established a dialogue with her son. She expressed her feelings, her anxieties, her joys and her small pleasures like a croissant for breakfast. Always after her coffee and croissant, her paintings were more colorful, lighter ... and on cold or cloudy days, or on days of troubled thoughts, her paintings printed a much darker tone. Eu_Clides grew up in this universe. Among the reflections of his own image, the solitude of the mirrors and the tenuous contact with his mother, shaped his personality. What caused him relationship problems, such as the lack of courage to interact and even to look directly in the eyes of the few customers who appeared in the store. An invisible wall grew around it. With a sweet personality, Eu_Clides is a spectator of the world. A voyeur locked in his own universe. When I went out into the street, I looked in the shop windows, in the windows of the houses, in the puddles of water on the floor, in order to be able, in that world, which seems hostile, to recognize something that is familiar ... his own face.