Aurelino dos Santos and the City as a System of Signs
Origins
Aurelino dos Santos, born in Salvador in 1942, belongs to a vital current of Brazilian art in which self-taught invention becomes a rigorous way of thinking through place. The biographical source supplied for this draft identifies him as a Bahian visual artist, autodidact, former bus fare collector, and painter whose artistic path was encouraged through contact with the sculptor Agnaldo Santos and, indirectly, by the cultural environment shaped by Lina Bo Bardi in Bahia. That context matters because Aurelino's paintings do not behave like simple views of Salvador. They transform the city into an alphabet of facades, bridges, roads, hills, water, numbers, printed fragments, and geometric signs. His work reads architecture as memory and daily life as visual structure, joining popular observation to a strikingly constructive sense of design. See also J. Cunha and the Graphic Imagination of Bahia.
The 2008 work selected here is a remarkable example of that urban grammar. A bridge crosses the upper field while the lower half becomes a dense construction of towers, ladders, windows, colored modules, and machine-like forms. Blue water and green hills remain visible behind the architecture, but the painting refuses postcard calm. Salvador is reorganized into a vibrant mechanism. Pink, yellow, red, blue, black, and green behave almost like traffic signals, playing pieces, and sacred markers at once. The result is both playful and disciplined: a handmade system in which infrastructure, landscape, and imagination are locked into one restless composition. It is less a cityscape than a mental map, built from movement, labor, memory, and the constant rhythm of crossing through the city. See also Cordel Does Not Fit in Drawers: Marina Nabuco on the Living Archive of Instituto Brincante.
Practice and materials
The two blue-green city works expand that language in different directions. One arranges facades, mountains, streets, and water into horizontal layers, as if the city had been compressed into a map, a frieze, and a memory at the same time. The other, darker and more mineral, turns the landscape into a textured field of blues, greys, greens, golds, scratches, and dotted paths. Here the city is no longer only architectural. It becomes geological, atmospheric, almost nocturnal. Hills, rivers, routes, and signs remain present, but the surface insists on the act of painting itself: scraping, marking, layering, and returning to the image until the place feels both recognizable and invented. This tension between legibility and invention is central to his force; Aurelino lets Bahia appear through structure, but never reduces it to illustration.
The fourth work, dated 2011, introduces printed matter into the same urban syntax. Newspaper clippings, supermarket prices, advertisements, numbers, and fragments of public language are inserted into hard-edged color fields. It is an especially revealing image because it shows Aurelino's interest in the city as a system of visual information, not only as a set of buildings. Commerce, media, consumption, and everyday reading become part of the pictorial structure, carrying the ordinary pressure of public life into the studio. For CASCA, Aurelino dos Santos matters because his paintings turn the everyday signs of Bahia into an original form of urban abstraction. Architecture becomes pattern, landscape becomes code, and the noise of the street becomes a bright, fragile, and deeply personal image of collective life. His paintings insist that local experience can generate its own visual system, sophisticated precisely because it remains close to the street.
