Children Playing and Goodbye

Cícero Dias’s childhood was marked by experiences in the sugar mills his family owned in northeastern Brazil, and memories of them would appear much later in his art. In the late nineteen-twenties, Dias painted countless watercolors in which the local flora and fauna appear alongside members of his family and other people found in both the mills’ main house and in the senzala, initially the slaves’ quarters and later where the peasants lived. These paintings partake of the surrealist imaginary with its own set of laws that unsettles time and space. Behind the vegetation in the foreground of "Crianças brincando e o adeus" are two scenes incongruent in scale, space, and time: to the right, a girl (not two, as the title suggests) plays with a pet in two distinct moments in a sequentially altered action; to the left, the inert body of a middle-aged man suggests a tragic event. Death in all its relentlessness offsets, in this work, childhood’s vitality and agitation.