I was happy to find this beautiful letter that I received from the philosopher and social scientist Roberto Motta, my husband's friend, compadre, and work colleague. I transcribe its content below.       

 

 I am very impressed by the dreamlike atmosphere that permeates Mazé Andrade's art. It is as if the painter went beyond the magical door that takes us to the world of dreams, of gardens and enchanted forests, of that world in which archetypes, the deepest roots of our unconscious, are immersed. When I look at his paintings, what I feel is no different from what I experience when reading the stories from the Arabian Nights or the mysterious robbery that took over my being as I crossed the streets of New Delhi, on a night lit by a piece of moon that had just come out of the fairy stories of my childhood. But these fairy stories, the one that Mazé's painting transports me to, have I actually read or heard them, or have I simply imagined them, contemplating the painter's paintings and remembering India?

 And therein lies what in my view is the essential characteristic of Mazé's painting and of all true art. Make it so that not only the artist himself, but also those who contemplate his creations become people other than what they are in their daily lives as housewives, sociologists, architects, public servants, workers, psychologists. Make us overcome ourselves, gain additional value, a new infinitely precious personality, through creation, dream, trance.

 These are almost the words of a great French sociologist, Michel Leiris, which I used to describe the enthusiasm that the paintings of my godmother and great friend Mazé Andrade cause me, whose work I have been following for several years and which, in addition to the contentment that gives, by transporting us to the kingdom of beauty, teaches us a very important lesson. "The essential is invisible to the eye", said another Frenchman, Antoine de Saint-Exupèry. Well, I will dare to correct this writer. The essential is what is visible to the artist's eyes; the basic is what, through her vision, we learn to see - this world so old and so new, which gives our existence its true colors.

 

• ROBERTO MAURO CORTEZ MOTTA graduated in Philosophy from UFPE (1962), has a master's degree in Social Sciences from the Institute of Social Sciences, in The Hague, Netherlands (1964) and a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University (1984), in addition to a post-doctorate in Paris, Rome, Harvard and Los Angeles. He occupies chair 46 (emeritus member) of the Pernambucana Academy of Sciences. He has been a professor or researcher, permanent or visiting at UFPE, Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Recife), University of Paris V (Sorbonne), Rome II, California, in Los Ângeles, the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, from the State University of Paraíba, from the University of Caën, etc. 

Source: https://academiapc.org/academicos/46-1-roberto-mauro-cortez-motta/