The Armorial Heritage

Once, French author Albert Camus stated that a man ́s masterpiece is no more than an attempt at rediscovering, through the deviations of art, those two or three simple and great images to which his heart opened for the first time.

These images, in my case, are viscerally linked to the Sertão (Backwoods) and to the popular artistic manifestations from the Northeast, and it was from my father that I learned to love all of this.

When I was still a boy, I enthusiastically accompanied the rehearsals that the Quinteto Armorial held in the living room of our home and the directions that my father would give the musicians, often reciting from his privileged memory, cordel literature that Antonio Madureira would later use in his compositions.

Aloisio Magalhães, Francisco Brennand and Gilvan Samico, my father ́s long-time friends, were frequent visitors, and always offered us the artwork they had produced and that I admired on the walls of our house.

Without forgetting the works by my mother, Zélia, that brought the beauty of the Zona da Mata, which was more concerned with graciousness, to dialogue with the grandiosity of the Sertão, introduced by my father; or the works of José de Barros, who was a relative of mine and also one of my teachers.

Thus, when the path of art irrefutably came into my life, all the poetics of the Movimento Armorial (Armorial Movement) already pulsated in my blood and in my memory, associated to Aloisio ́s abstractionism and embodied by my own ideas.

This is why I often say that I don ́t exactly follow the Movimento Armorial, but I carry it with me always, no matter where I go, in this almost unconscious and obsessive search for images of a past that still throbs within me with the force of a horse ́s uncontrolled gallop.

Manuel Dantas Suassuna