Santídio Pereira

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain's collection includes a work by Santídio Pereira, and the artist participated in the exhibition Nous les Arbres at the Fondation Cartier in 2019, together with its travelling version, Trees, at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in 2020. Santídio Pereira also participated in the Siamo Foresta exhibition organised by the Fondation Cartier and the Triennale Milano in 2023.

Santídio Pereira moved to São Paulo when he was eight and joined Instituto Acaia, an association that assists children and teenagers who live near the Ceagesp. Through the workshops organised at the Ateliescola Acaia, Santídio re-established a connection with his childhood memories and native region, which would, at a later stage, strongly guide his artistic practice. He chose vegetation as the central motif in his work, thus participating in celebrating different types of rain and the transformation plant life according to the seasons. The artist aims to illustrate the abundance and diversity of the caatingas, xeric shrubland and thorn forests that shed their leaves seasonally, as well as the vast variety of cacti in the Northeast Region of Brazil. Santídio Pereira's works revive and revitalise the significant Brazilian tradition of wood engraving, as performed by renowned artists such as Oswaldo Goeldi, Manoel Messias, and Anna Maria Maiolino. Pereira often uses several matrices for each engraving; a technique he calls "incision, cut, and fitting", which makes each engraving unique. Thus, the accumulation of thick layers of ink of different colours recreates elements from his emotional memory of the fauna, flora, people, and objects.