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 Paulo Roberto Pires Jornalista |
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"Professional deformation and amateur obsession make me associate caricature to music and literature. As good as reading or listening to an artist´s piece is to see him portrayed in lines that graphically translate the essence of what he plays, composes or writes. This pleasure is, for me, the most remarkable point of the gallery of magnificent drawings that I am glad to watch growing in the collaboration that Babel - no.com´s culture section - does with Leo Martins. Even in a virtual newsroom the rush is real, and it´s at this speed, when deadline´s for yesterday that Leo still achieves great moments. His drawings don´t merely illustrate a story: they dialogue with it and the reader, in general putting aside the stereotypes that the automation of news usually impose to us. Thus, Jean-Paul Sartre, a frequently portrayed celebrity with so many distinguishable peculiarities, shows unsuspicious colours and humour and Castro Alves (Brazilian classical poet) keeps the unalterable nobility of the great classic he is. John Coltrane is described by Aldir Blanc (Brazilian composer) with his "hands holding up the saxophone as if they pointed an obsidian knife against his own chest". Abstract? Have a look at Leo´s ´Trane and everything seems clearer. And, just in order to show that these are really not mere illustrations, it´s important to notice that text and image were produced simultaneously. Not hard for Carl G. Jung to explain. And, once the topic now is sincronicity, same thing also happened about Miles Davis, perplexing blot that doesn´t exactly looks like the man, but in fact is his music in all its silences and abstractions. In a rare moment of a request in advance, with humane deadline, I drop onto Leo´s table the task of portraying Gustave Flaubert. When I later passed around his desk, I saw dozens of sketches and a complete dissatisfaction. Nothing looked good for him. Just like the writer of "le mot juste" (the exact word), Leo seeked the exact line. And after sweating a lot he finally did. "Flaubert is the eye", he said. And there´s no way to deny. " |
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Leo Martins is a self-taught caricaturist. He began his professional carreer back in 1995, after giving up architecture school. Since then, he was published in several newspapers and magazines in Brazil and awarded in many editions of Salão Carioca de Humor, a respected yearly humor exhibition. His drawings already embellished pages and covers of newspapers such as Folha de São Paulo, Jornal do Brasil, O Dia and Gazeta Mercantil Latino-Americana - this one distributed to many countries in Latin America - and also magazines such as Veja Rio, Veredas and Cult among others, as well as long-term collaborations with the magazine of Confederação Nacional da Indústria and, specially, the extinct news website Notícia e Opinião (News and Opinion), where he met some of the best journalists who currently produce another on-line publication: No Mínimo, featuring his artwork daily on its first page.
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