A HARD RAIN'S A GONNA FALL Painting

A HARD RAIN'S A GONNA FALL acrylic, dry pastel and crayon Conté on canvas 147x76 cm Brasilia, August 2019 Dedicated to Bob Dylan with references to Denise Macedo and the cat Chico and with a hint of self portrait It was a lazy afternoon in the central western lands of the country. After working all day, around 5 pm, I stopped and decided to watch a Martin Scorsese movie about Bob Dylan, Rolling Thunder Revue: The Bob Dylan Story, which I had not yet seen. But it's not exactly about the movie I want to talk about, it's about Bob Dylan's poetics, in particular about a song A hard rain's a gonna fall, whose epic lyrics took me back to my youth when I heard that song a lot, and brought me back to the present times, when this country called Brazil is under the neofascistaliberal yoke of stupidity, prejudice and violence in its various forms of manifestation. Heavy rain falls on our history, black clouds laden with ignorance are forming on the horizon, the country has dimmed, or at least the stupidity that has always been present, has manifested itself stronger and more stupid than ever. I had the music in my head for days… until last week, working in my studio at Vila Telebrasília, the idea came up: a painting that rescued my youth by listening to Bob Dylan and that brought out the feeling that takes over some people in this depressing historical moment. 3 painting sessions and the painting was done, just over a week from start to finish… Some paintings are resolved quickly, others may take years in the studio until a solution appears. In this case, I solved the painting almost without thinking, perhaps because the urgency of attitudes towards such a depressing socio-political scenario was necessary. Every artist, simply because he is an artist, acts in resistance, walks a very thin line between engagement and pure form, it is no coincidence that all authoritarian regimes pursue the artist and the intellectuals, in a way art is always critical, even if it is a pure manifestation of form, like Klee's angels or Kandinsky's lines.