Dorian Gray Caldas: a trajetória biográfica de um artista precursor de uma identidade potiguar (1950-1989)

Abstract

This current essay analyzes biographical trajectory of the plastic artist and natalense writer Dorian Gray, well known as one of the artistic modernity precursors in Rio Grande do Norte. His pictorial production included drawing, easel painting, mural painting, mosaic, sculpture, ceramics, picture and tapestry. The main goal of this dissertation is to explore how Dorian Gray made a personal identity based on modern art and in what way his protagonism interfered in the formation of Potiguar art. It prioritizes a temporal cut, from 1950, the year which he started his professional career, in the I Salão de Arte Moderna de Natal in partnership with the artists Newton Navarro and Ivon Rodrigues, to 1989, when was published the book “Artes Plásticas do Rio Grande do Norte (1920-1989)”, work of his own which consolidates an idea of the potiguar artistic identity. Its first chapter analyzes how art became an option of life to Dorian Gray and how he created the idea of an artistic tradition to his family. Its second chapter investigates his cultural production in the delimited period, sociability networks made by him and his participation in the formation of the Natalense artistic modernity. The third chapter examines, from a point, the pictures that Dorian created about him and about what considered to have done to the cultural and intellectual areas of Rio Grande do Norte, and to another point, how his contemporaries represented the artist and his work. Some speeches made after his death and strategies used by his family and cultural institutions to preserve the artist‟s memory were recovered. As theoretical contribution, uses the perception of biography (DOSSE, 2009; LORIGA, 2011), social setting (ELIAS, 1994), modernity (BERMAN, 1986) and memory framing (POLLACK, 1989, 1992) and the theoretical-methodological referential of Oral History of life (PORTELLI, 1997). The relation between History and space is discussed in the perspective of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (2013), to whom the space is a place which creates identity. The main sources used are interviews based on Oral History, news published in the newspapers A República, O Poti e Diário de Natal, speeches and memorialist texts.