“I had no idea what I would find when we decided to fly to the distant state of Sergipe,” says director André Lion, who traveled to northeastern Brazil to document the life and work of a small-town artist called Veio. “Despite being a huge admirer of his work, my contact with Veio had only been by telephone. Also, my anxiety about the trip was forged by the false idea that we must have control over everything—a state of mind imposed on us by big cities. But I set this aside and ended up embarking on one of my most pleasant documentary experiences.”

Veio is a short film that immerses the audience into the isolated universe of a self-taught artist who looks to nature to guide his work and philosophy. Veio spent much of his formative years in the company of adults, gradually developing an interest in bygone eras and the recent past. This earned him the nickname Veio—meaning ‘old’ in Portuguese.

The art displayed throughout the film is handmade by Veio, who takes dead trees, sourced from swathes of deforested land, and gives them new life as objects of art. Stripping the bark down to its smooth core, Veio transforms roots and trunks into surreal creatures born of pure imagination.

“Veio completely opened up the doors of his life to us. I finally understood that he is much more than an artist in the contemporary sense of the word, Veio lives his life as a work of art,” says Lion. “His artistic production is just another piece of a complex diagram of a man intrinsically linked to his environment and his history. Never before has Ernst Gombrich's famous phrase made so much sense to me: There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.”