CIA DAS LETRINHAS – SP 2002
JABUTI AWARD – ILLUSTRATION CATEGORY – 2003
LUÍS JARDIM AWARD – THE BEST BOOK WITHOUT TEXT – 2003
Rui de Oliveira recovers the originals of the classic literature for kids and defends the end of the Manichaeism imposed to the style.
This Carioca artist exemplifies the present time of the fairy tales in people’s daily life, with differences as for the outcome goes. To him, the fairy tales should be told to the children with the same realism of when they were created centuries ago – mainly along the middle age – even though sometimes it is necessary to describe cruelty scenes, morally questionable. In that sense, the artist has just published “Chapeuzinho Vermelho e Outros Contos por Imagem” (Little Red Riding Hood and Other Tales by Image) – an illustrated album that goes beyond a children’s book.
His idea is to rescue the oldest reports of the fairy tales, in an editorial proposal that is anchored in a graphic narrative extremely detailed. The central point of the illustrator’s idea is that: each scene is actually a jigsaw puzzle loaded with icons, symbols and meanings that demands a dedication to which the reader is not very used to. In other words: to “read” the drawings in order to capture the bottom line of the story. We should not be fooled and imagine that the artist have made pictures with abstractionist figures and with open and wide subjective interpretations. Everything is very clear and perceptible; all that is needed is a little attention. Considered one of the most important children’s book cover illustrators of Brazil, Rui illustrated the book covers of more than a hundred works, and schemed more than 400 book covers for the main publishing houses of children and youth Brazilian literature.
GONÇALO JÚNIOR in Gazeta Mercantil newspaper – (August 18,19,20, 2000).
It is just arriving at the bookstores a beautiful innovation for children and adults that listen to and tell histories. In the book Chapeuzinho Vermelho e Outros Contos por Imagem – (Little Red Riding Hood and Other Tales by Image) – the Carioca Rui de Oliveira offers a gallery of drawings that retell three stories to be seen with sharpened eyes.
The artist, age 59, chose three classic stories – Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Bluebeard – to propose that the reader sees each story in pictures that amount to 80% of the book. The drawings enlarge the details, which are loaded with emotion accentuated by the black-and-white colors; they reveal with rawness the fear of the lost little brothers in the forest, the wild glance of the murderous husband, the voracious drool of the wolf ready to attack. As a gift to the attentive eyes, Rui adds on in four pages the studies for the scenes of the Bluebeard.
CARLOS URBIM – RBS Agency – 2002
Chapeuzinho Vermelho e Outros Contos por Imagem, by Rui de Oliveira. Text adaptations by Luciana Sandroni. Companhia das Letrinhas Publishing House, 71 pages.
The project is daring and its daringness shocks, in the best of the senses. In a field where image and text are viscerally and passionately interlinked, and where everyone hope to find a colorful world, and lots of phrases used adjectivally with the purpose to move the reader, “Chapeuzinho Vermelho e Outros Contos por Imagem” (Little Red Riding Hood and Other Tales by Image), a beautiful edition by Companhia das Letrinhas, leaves the reader breathless before the somewhat gloomy illustrations in black and white done by Rui de Oliveira. The text intentionally short, dry, and direct of Luciana Sandroni’s adaptations works almost as if a remark to the following story.
This is not what one might expect from a children’s book but, at the same time, it is everything that one might expect from an edition created to “uneducate” or reeducate the small eyes trained by hundreds and hundreds of years in which popular tales – most of which born sad and cruel, since they mirror, in some way, the terrible reality of hunger, cold, and the unsoundness of its time – were little by little edulcorated and wrapped to please all kind of customer.
The beautiful drawings belong to the award winner Rui de Oliveira
Very young readers may not fully understand the vision of the artist’s sophisticated drawings. These drawings have different textures that go back to the engravings of the old story books. Characters jump from the paper with expressions loaded with fear, terror, distrust, power, and sarcasm. But at the end of the edition the reader can see sketches of some scenes and follow the process of the author’s creation.
The expurgation of the fairy tales went on to transform them little by little into, almost exclusively, a conflict between good and evil, without nuances or subtexts. Therefore, it is good that beautiful publishing as this one comes once in a while to mess a little with that vision.
MÀNYA MILLEN in O GLOBO newspaper – (March 2, 2002).
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