JABUTI AWARD – ILLUSTRATION CATEGORY 1995
LUIS JARDIM AWARD – THE BEST BOOK WITHOUT TEXT – 1995
To me The Beauty and the Beast is the most complex of all fairy tales from the human psyche standpoint. It is a highly emblematic and meaningful story, for that reason the challenge was to translate something that is purely abstract and conceptual into images, without making any concession to the word.
I wish that the images created by me thinking about the children would get to them.
It is frustrating because, although I have dedicated all my life to the infantile public, few children had access to my books. My great sorrow is to see a country that is unequal, antidemocratic, anti-Christian, and materialistic. A colonized country where the children are marginalized, they don’t have school and therefore they cannot read. That whole social cataclysm reflects on both the book and my work. My relief, my lenitive is that the children might not have had access to my books for economical reasons, for a wild and vulgar capitalism, but all of my books were done thinking about them, thinking about communicating with them. If they didn’t get to read my books it is because I am an artist, and I don’t have the power to change things. My power is my work, which I always did thinking about the children.
Interviewed by BENITA PRIETO in CULTURARTE – (May 1995).
Rui de Oliveira became an eminent illustrator by transforming the literary fantasies narrated by many writers into beautiful images. After many years as coauthor, Rui took off in his first solo publishing the book “Beauty and the Beast” based on the story by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. And his version, as from today, obtained a wide exhibition mounted in the foyer of the CCBB. In an enchantment of the fairy tales, the scenographers Marcelo Ribeiro and Christiane Mello set the atmosphere – that gathers the original illustrations of the book – as if it ware in one of the Beast’s palace chambers. With that Rui accomplishes another old dream: to do an exhibition especially for children: “It is a didactic display about the art of illustration in which I also show other drawings that has nothing to do with children books. But the children will have ludic activities. I want them to be highly pleased in seeing an image and that that image has some meaning to them” says Rui.
The illustrator chose Beauty and the Beast to transform into a book for considering it the most emblematic and significant fairy tale in terms of archetypes. And to reinforce that unconscious language, Rui opted not to use any word in his book. The strength is only in the narrative image.
O GLOBO newspaper – (September 27, 1994)
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