Pilot:3

"Mauro Cerqueira's body of work includes sculptures, installations, drawings as well as series of collaborations: he has put on, together with friends, numerous performances that recall glam rock and punk shows, where we find an aestheticization of kitsch and the pairing of popular culture's detritus with fine art.

Also in his sculptures we can find an embrace of the rough-hown and the decayed, side by side with science-fiction utopian images from the 50's and 60's like those of planets and rocket ships. But drawing is the most important and extensive part of his work, and he is one of the many young artists that are infusing the medium with a renewed sense of urgency and showing that it is becoming more relevant as the primitive or low-tech seems nowadays to have a new resonance.

Even his presence on the world wide web, with a blog called "planetamauro" [planet Mauro] plays, almost with adolescent humour, with the most digital of mediums, presenting as a serious archive sketchy rough drawings of an incredible variety of everyday objects.

This artist's work cultivates and emanates what makes drawing what it is: the unfinished, the cheap, the inconscious, the imperfect. His pictures focus on the darker facets of the psyche, and the hazy sphere of personal obsessions. His peculiar iconography, violent scenes of black humour replete with scatological and sexual alllusions dealing in the conventions of the cartoon, the comic strip and the "fanzine", creates a universe that swings between melancholy and ecstasy, desire and despair, blood and human fluids."

Ricardo Nicolau, in: PILOT:3 (catalogue)