Description
Fine art print of illustration “Ficus Benjamina 01” part of the book “Benjamina”, by Nelson Cruz
The work is sent inside a rigid folder handcrafted specifically for it.
Dimensions: 23,5 x 42 cm
Series of 20
About the book
Fragile. Careful. Rough. Weight. Content. Product. Stepping. These are fragments of Benjamina’s narratives, which evoke the marks of our time in their desperate harshness. From used cardboard boxes – trash for most people, but work and survival for others – Nelson Cruz rescues images and words and uses them to create poetry, transforming raw weights into some delicacy, fragility into possibilities and products into invitations. Using cardboard as a support and with information that describes and guides the transportation, stacking and storage of the most diverse products, the artist mourns landscapes that no longer exist in many of our cities and are becoming imperceptibly absent from our hearts. The twisted stumps that remain from trees cut down on an avenue in Belo Horizonte are reinvented in paintings that overlap instructions on soap, bleach, coffee grounds and sausages, awakening pain and revolt for the forbidden life, lost shadows, air that will not be breathed and beauty that will not be seen. Benjamina could be read as despair, but the simple fact that it was created and reached us as a book constitutes resistance, unlike the moments when we occupy the streets and chant our demands for more just lives and times for all people, so urgent in our country. The uncomfortable beauty and strength of the images and words that the author takes from the mundane and recreates in poems are a rejection of things as they are and an affirmation of an uncompromising commitment to constructions – artistic, political, social – of how they could be.
Fabíola Farias
Publisher/seal: Miguilim
exhibition Sem Palavras
The documentary series “Sem Palavras”, which premiered on Canal Arte 1 in March 2025, brings together 13 of the most prominent artists in Brazilian illustrated books. On the occasion of this premiere, we held an event at the gallery, when we began to exhibit and sell works by all these illustrators.
About the artist
Nelson Cruz is a self-taught artist who studied painting for two years in Belo Horizonte, where he was born in 1957. He has been a painter and illustrator since the 1970s. He began working in the publishing industry in 1988. In 1999, he received the Octogonal Prize from the Centre International d’Études en Littérature de Jeunesse in Paris for his picture book Leonardo. Leonardo also won the Prize for best picture book from FNLIJ, the Brazilian section of IBBY. In 2001, the book Chica e João received the Jabuti Prize for its text, and from FNLIJ, the Prize for Best Children’s Book and for best illustration. The same book also received the Octogonal Prize in 2001. In 2002, he was nominated by FNLIJ for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for illustration and in 2004 for the Honor List, both promoted by IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, in Switzerland.
About Fine Art Printing
These are those created with techniques and materials that use the most rigorous criteria today to achieve an impression with museum longevity.
The papers are 100% cotton. The inks, which are made of mineral pigments, are not soluble in water, therefore they do not fade. And the color fidelity, by using RGB, is much greater than common printing.
A work printed in fine art, therefore, deserves to be signed and numbered, and can last a lifetime.
