Corneta

There's a sunny side to the city of Torres Vedras that only appears during Carnival. It's not a meteorological phenomenon, it's not a sudden appearance of the sun, it's not even a miracle. This light appears on people's faces when they finally sense they can break free from everything that restricts their movements during the rest of the year. It happens when it's finally time to be who we truly want to be.

It's no wonder that so many of us spend a year anxiously awaiting the upcoming Carnival. There's a kind of longing for which there's no other word to describe this absence of Carnival within us, so present is it throughout the year. It's what Carnival gives us and, at the same time, what it takes away, by not allowing us to live in it all the time.

This pursuit of the approaching Carnival might explain how habitually serious a city is, which, on certain days of the year, becomes so cheerful, playful, passionate, and mischievous. All the vital energies of a smile are concentrated in that week when we dedicate ourselves to a freedom that could be called unknown, but whose roots are well identified. Because when Carnival settles in our minds, a new person is reborn, breaks free from their shell, and goes out there.

If each person adopts their own calendar in the relationship they determine with Carnival, anticipating or prolonging it according to their thirst for a mask or resistance within it, the beginning of the festivities is a kind of sacred border from which there is no return. On that morning, the continents of before and after are definitively separated. The lands move, the guards are released, the steps are defined. In this unstoppable direction that Carnival propels us once and for all. To this sun that touches us and of which we will be messengers for five (or six) days.

It was from this sunny side that Corneta inscribed himself in the history of Carnival. In the consolidation of the human into a figure of enormous passion and extreme ability to make himself close. In those days, those that remain in the images of this exhibition, Corneta embodied all the love he felt for his land, for the people who lived or visited here, that enormous smile that reached others because it was born from some place of purity that Carnival knows how to inspire in the people of Rio.

Corneta, who took on all the unique characters of our most popular tradition, demonstrated himself to be the essence of Carnival. The friendly clown, who sometimes cries, sometimes laughs, a serious face of success in the way he approaches each future Carnival project and shows it, with open arms, what Carnival is. The central Matrafona, from whom he appropriated the best clumsy way and returned to her that unique sensuality of Carnival presence in the proposed inversion of roles. In short, the messenger of that brilliance that only Carnival holds within us.