HÉLIO MELO
Hélio Melo( b. 1926, Boca do Acre, Brazil; d. 2001, Goiânia, Brazil) worked for many years as a rubber tapper in Acre, a Brazilian state in the western Amazon that borders Peru and Bolivia. This lived experience became the driving force behind his narrative production, both in painting and musical composition. With an explicitly political stance, Melo exposes the state ' s neglect toward rubber-tapper families and cooperatives— one aspect of a broader program of progressive deforestation and environmental destruction in the Amazon. A self-taught artist, he depicts scenes in which rubber tappers learn directly from nature and Indigenous traditions, often embedding autobiographical elements in his work.
In the drawings presented here— made with leaf extracts prepared by the artist himself and India ink on cardboard— Melo stages various playful scenes. An anthropomorphic cow wearing a dress and holding an umbrella tries to pull a rubber tapper by the leg, while the tapper’ s wife, clinging to him, pleads for him to stay. In another scene, a rubber tapper attempts to distract a jaguar with his shirt. These works consistently emphasize their environment: elevated wooden stilt houses with thatched roofs, backyard bonfires used to heat and mold raw latex into solid balls for export, and dense forests depicted with intricate geometry and lush canopies. The political dimension of Melo’ s work is explicit in several pieces, such as the drawing of a rubber tapper who, while incising a tree to extract its sap, rests a rifle against the trunk— both to defend himself from wild animals and to signal his readiness for armed confrontation in a region characterized by rural violence.( MATEUS NUNES)
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