FRANCISCO GALENO: O Piauí é aqui — o Piauí não é aqui | 12 November 2024 - 25 January 2025

Piauí is here — and Piauí is not here

Leno Veras

The Northern portion of the Brazilian Northeast Coast is marked by its perennial exposure to wind power, which is why the rafts with their colorful sails hoisted in hyperbolic bends have become an allegory commonly attributed to the seamen of the region, upon whom distinct original construction techniques converge, adding material culture knowledge to the immaterial science transmitted from the riverine to the coastal populations through flows that feedback upon each other like intercommunicating vessels; or, for a better picture, like waterways that branch out entropically, culminating on an estuary mouth yielded by the arrival of the river that (like an artery) traverses backlands, moors, and prairies until it washes into the ocean, vascularizing the Parnaíba Delta.

Out of the near-hundred river isles that reveal myriad autochthonous ecosystems, at the heart of the Mid-North of Brazil, in the transitional area between the midland and Amazonian biomes, stands out the Great Island of Santa Isabel, the largest in the archipelago in land extension, as well as the most densely populated: born in this collision (and coalition) landmark, among human and physical geographies, Francisco Galeno congregates, as if by a genealogical stratigraphy, a transversal collection of ancestral wisdom—his canoe-master great-grandfather; his leatherman grandfather; his construction woodworker father; his lacemaking artist mother. Fed by the roots, he begat fruit nurtured by a family tree whose culture is an integral part of its natural environment.

Bobbin lacework—a technique originating from the Portuguese colonization very present in the navigation routes that connected the fortresses between the North and Northeast occupations (Parnaíba being halfway between major urban hubs such as Recife, in the State of Pernambuco, and Belém, in the State of Pará)—is, nowadays, a landmark of cultural crossover between the European and Indigenous traditions. Ilha Grande, specifically, is recognized by its central regional position in the development of this social technology. After all, it is a form of community articulation with a marked presence of natively female know-how. The artist was exposed, until around his first decade, not just to the visuality encouraged by the praxis, but also and above all, to its context.

The geometric aspect of the lacemaking craft, conformed by concentric lines, carries a constructive lexicon driven by a flexible module structure—a feature that is clearly present in Francisco’s pictorial language. The replication, which seems at first based on sequences, unfolds after axes that support continuity systems, loci of memorabilia sewn by a markedly pure chromatic expression; it is the colors that bear the form. His painting is at once extremely simple and profoundly complex, like a vortex fed by inflows ranging from the Modern abstractionist vanguards to the movements that find wealth in the so-called poor materialities; a Cubism influx among Brazilian Modernisms, constructive reflux via popular culture.

The architecture of the houses made of timber (commonly sourced from the trunks of carnaubas, a tree species whose wax led the first occupation cycle in the coast of Piauí, having been one of the most valuable so-called drugs of the backlands at the end of the 19^th Century) conforms the social grid inhabiting Galeno’s imagery, in a continuum between objects, subjects, and spaces. The children’s games, the community celebrations, the popular housing—narratives present in several points of the Brazilian Modernist arena—weave together, this time around as a deftly embroidered lace made by a Northeasterner whose gaze is soaked in the confrontation with the hard social reality of the marginal populations. Between the sertão (backlands) turned sea and the sea turned sertão, pendular migration will outline his pathways.

In addition to his figurative themes that see amalgamated industrial design objects—with a strong presence in the daily lives of the backland populations, such as the oil lamp (which he deconstructs in one of his pieces like a reverse technical blueprint)—and handmade artifacts born in the family, such as wooden toys, his architectural and urbanistic representations also show that a constructive nexus is constant in his visual expression, found even in the concrete form assumed by his assemblages when emulating familiar furniture; like chests of drawers containing the memories and histories that overflow from their original land into a new frame, a square planted in the middle of the map: the federal capital—the modern Brasília.

The alias of “candango” became ossified as the designator of the immigrants, mostly from the Northeast and specifically from Piauí, who were in fact and effect the builders of the new national center of political power, smack in the vertex between the Brazilian macro-regions. Many of them, the majority, however, never had access to the residences within those four lines of the Federal District’s geometric territory. For this reason, Galeno shifts to the center and off-center at once in his move to the epicenter of the country—he goes on to live in one of the towns known pejoratively as “satellite cities”: like in a self-affirming reciprocity, the settlement of Brazlândia (in Brasília’s orbit) becomes his new panorama of resident dwelling between popular culture and a modern program.

Tensing up the borders between painting and sculpture, the artist builds there one of his most important works—with a constructive drive and concrete bent (literally, this time)—through the hard work of paving the margins of lake Veredinha with Portuguese cobblestones. This paved walk, a medium of plastic expression whose potential for geometric visual force had already gained international recognition in the previous federal capital, prior to the planned city built in the 1960s, becomes cultural heritage, recognized instead by the latter’s population. His open-air piece anchors the emigrant memory in the form of an ambling spatiality. It is, therefore, only in 1990 that this new piauiense-brasiliensis identity will shape up its historicity, appropriated by its people through public art.

Francisco Galeno, when planting his flag in the Brazilian Central Plateau, connects spaces and times that were disconnected until then. His geometry, as concave as it is convex, is seen from the outside in, and from the inside out. It is not for nothing that destination and origin trace the shapes of the here and now.

Leno Veras is a curator, researcher and professor

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FRANCISCO GALENO: O Piauí é aqui — o Piauí não é aqui: Critical essay: Leno Veras

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