Caetano Dias
b. Feira de Santana, Bahia, 1959
Born in Feira de Santana, Bahia, in 1959. He lives and works in Salvador, Bahia.
The start of his career was marked by urban intervention, with paintings made in public spaces in Salvador. His work no longer privileges a single support or technique: he works with video, painting, three-dimensional works, multimedia installation, digital photography and performance. His work has reflected on the relations between body and identity, memory and belonging, which have become central axes of his research in art.
His is a painting essentially of colour over colour, beyond the gesture — now firmly marked, incisive — vibrating in search of an art that draws from colour itself the raw landscape of its surface, without accessories or ornament, in an increasingly essential making: not only through full command of technique, but through a compelling beauty drawn from his own reality. It is a corporeal painting, a painting that exists through its own act of creation, now carried out with multiple media that insert or integrate marks, exposing his creative attitude towards making and remaking and leaving the viewer to decide what to see — provided the eye knows how to see, or understand, the construction of this language. National critics consider him one of the most important artists to have emerged in Bahia in recent times.
Artist biographies are translated from the collection's Portuguese records.
