The work of art, being it a painting, a poem or a symphony, is the materialization, the objective expression of feelings and states of mind, almost always motivated and stimulated by necessities inherent to all individuals, but different in its signs and meanings, That is what we get from the work of Jorge Eduardo Alves de Souza, whose highlights are patient strength and simplicity, allied to the great capacity of feeling Nature, at the same time prodigious and spontaneous. In the real origin of his artistic craftsmanship is deep emotion, surprising in its objectivity and synthetic spirit.

As an instrument of personal expression, Jorge Eduardo's work does not aim at self-revelation or, in other words, does not exclusively use particular emotions or details. It reflects, in fact, in a very broad sense, a very personal view of objects, events and situations common to all Mankind. The artist's mastery takes them away from common place and banality, through the original view it gives them, because it captures the importance in them. He leans over Nature and patiently analyses everything in it, showing it with delicacy of colour and balanced composition. In the windows series, Jorge Eduardo, like Proust, went deep into involving it in a cultural background of which it is part. In our point of view, a subtle manner of accusation and protest. There lying the vehemence of his work, in which the framed visual space emerges with great dignity, revealing an experienced view of serious problems, which have nothing to do with longing for bygone days. But with our own survival, for it refers to the preservation of Nature and to the human factor related to it, mercilessly punished.

Jorge Eduardo, through a language which flows to capture and involve the observer, by means of a careful choice of vocabulary, technically re- creates worn-out subjects. If the highlight, as we have already said, is the patient strength of the artist who re-creates, the support which props up all his work is the tacit alliance - austere but lovely - between Nature and the Man who faces Her.

However, the water series shows his mastership in the art of capturing the imponderable, the fugacious moment of the transitory, in which wave, transparence and reflex mix themselves in a flash of eternity. The beauty of the pictorial subject, once dense, once fluid, dresses up the image captured in detail, at the same time figurative in its deep essence, and conjectural for its shape, rich in artistic suggestions. Figurative or abstract, who knows?

The important thing is: Jorge Eduardo, in his love for Nature, as the creator he is, does not rest in mere contemplation: he knows She is always avid to receive seeds which will transform themselves into fruit...

Alcidio Mafra de Souza
July, 1982.