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Brazilian Flora in Wood

José Esteban Granero, born in Buenos Aires in 1955

Began to draw as a child and paints since adolescence. Studied in Buenos Aires Fine Arts School.

Lives in Brazil for about 30 years and has an atelier in the Cananéia Island. The island, in the South of São Paulo State, preserves an important area of native Atlantic Forest.

The original area covered by the Atlantic forest – twice the size of France and more than three times the German territory – has been reduced in the last 500 years from 1.2 million square kilometers to 91 thousand square kilometers. Less than 8% of its original area can be found in fragmented and dispersed areas.

The forest’s vegetation is rich and diverse - around 20,000 different species of plants, half of them endemic, representing 8% of the earth’s plants – including different types of orchids and bromeliads.

The Atlantic Forest shelters around 2,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians – 5% of the vertebrates on Earth. Nearly 200 bird species can be found nowhere else. 26 primate subspecies live in the forest of which 21 can only be found there. The forest also shelters 60% of all Brazilian endangered animals.

Esteban started painting with oil and acrylic on canvas. In the beginning he worked in figurative art. Afterwards moved to abstract works. Exhibitions in Argentina and Brazil were displayed during this phase. He also worked in educational activities for many years teaching drawing and painting.

Esteban’s experiences in the Atlantic Forest took him to merge abstract concepts from his paintings and different colors and possibilities of wood in his marquetry work. By this time, his educative activities included voluntary marquetry classes to destitute teenagers living near São Paulo city.

His works with wood are a result of his familiarity with the rich and different colors of wood that an atelier in the Atlantic forest provided. Naturally, Esteban’s art evolved by the use of volume, thus resulting in bass-reliefs and sculptures that use the figurative and abstract concepts, all of them inspired by the forest in all its density.

Instigated by the beauty he witnessed in his forest walkings, he began using wastes to sculpt. He has also been researching the importance of the forest, its preservation, species and plants that depend on it and studying the forest history in the eyes of the European travelers of the XVII and XVIII centuries like Von Marthius, Alexander Von Humboldt and Darwin, among others.

For the sculptures, he uses Peroba, an almost-extinct wood, from demolished or refurbished houses, saving this wood from being discarded or incinerated, as a tentative of rebirthing the forest by means of its artistic use.

In carving panels – portraying forest scenes in relief - he uses certified Cedar.

Nowadays Esteban gives workshops in wood sculpture and preservation.

Talking about his work in figurative panels he says that they are truly snapshots of the forest, its great variety of birds, rodents and mammals, waters full of fishes, turtles and alligators of different kind and sizes, trees filled with groups of butterflies searching little flowers and at the mercy of predators. The huge trees are also home to diverse plants, including orchids and bromeliads, with different shapes of leafs. This scenery has been portrayed accurately in wood panels using special techniques for carving in relief to capture the tangled vegetation of the forest.

In the case of the Peroba sculptures the realistic representation of the forest is not the goal but the starting point. Observing the rhythms, forms and density of the forest, he stylizes these forms in an abstract way, preserving the figurative references.

Inspired by nature, Esteban’s work has roots in his faith that humanity must preserve natural life and landscape.