The series "PICTURES" that I exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum of Pernambuco was specially outstanding, not only because it was the first time I showed works which focused on the human being, but also because of the fact that I had the privilege of showing them at the museum where I had done very important courses for my career, it was like returning to a starting point. In that series I showed the human being in his religious, working and psycho-affective dimensions. It was at the same time an exposition and an imposition of an inner feeling of love and uneasiness in view of the condition of being human. I had really a special pleasure in doing it. The introductory text was written by plastic artist Luciano Pinheiro: "Antonio Mendes’s recent paintings have astonished me, because I only knew his works concerning the landscape of Pernambuco and especially of Olinda, as well as the series on maracatus. These that are going to be exposed at the MAC have the human being as its theme, in three distinct areas: related to work, to religiousness and to inner psychological emotions. Mendes, an heir to Pernambuco’s figurative art, which is so despised today by the assimilated elite and uncommunicable wise men, does not intend to revolutionize, but seeks in the dedicated exercise of the art, the quality and coherence in what he does. And he is able to. In the majority of the paintings that make up this exhibition, either as far as technique and resulting plasticity of the correct and many times risky use of colors go, or a so objective theme that no manual is necessary for its comprehension. His art is accessible and has qualities. The concept of the man completely identified, the environment and the dignifying work can be seen in "Sugarcane Workers" and "Mister Neco from the four-corner grocery store". Rarely does he try to do social criticism, which "Woman and children at the garbage dump" is an example for, the humiliating side of work and human condition. Man and his religiousness identified in the "São Jorge Warrior” and in the expressive painting "Sheltering” (HIV-positive goddess), where he reveals the sublime side of fate and the psychological current that started in the triptych "Portraits 3x4" and develops on others with faces and facial expressions from joy to a shout of pain, self-portraits of the artist in trance? Birth and growth, "about death and dying" on almost dark canvas, almost shade, almost absence..” For Mendes, there is a certainty: the greatest landscape is still man. Olinda, 15/08/2001