Thus, the Cerrado acts as an inflection point in Dutra’s recent work. The more he distances himself from the overt and recognizable elements of his earlier practice, the closer he draws to its origin. What emerges is a compositional vision of the organic—images that surface from memory, intuition, and ancestral connection.

This return becomes the key to understanding his current language: a recursive fold through which he revisits lived stories, seeking the future within his own history. Whether as a guide to ancient rock paintings in Serranópolis or through spiritual experience, Dutra’s work is illuminated by multiple sources. His materials—chiefly charcoal and earthy pigments—seek a return to the ground, to their point of origin. Hence, the image of the root appears again and again as a dominant motif in his practice.

His most striking gestures remain within the realm of the sketch, the scribble, the deliberately unfinished. Yet these also become a kind of grounding—mirroring the artist’s own meanderings across the veins of the hinterland, captured in forms such as roots, leaves, Saint George’s swords, or hanging vines from fig trees. His constant experimentation—from graphite to industrial paint—results in layers of imagery that, while abstract, resemble the stunted growth of Cerrado flora, rendered in a multiplicity of repeated lines.

In this sense, the monumental horizon of the Cerrado paradoxically miniaturizes the images that arise from his drawing—distance turns things into smallness, into other formats. Dutra’s artistic journey maps the surrounding Cerrado, where, as Hugo de Carvalho Ramos also notes, one finds both plants useful to the caboclo—for their bark, leaves, and wood—and the countless “pau-à-toa,” trees of uncertain purpose. His sertão begins in the sacredness of gesture, in the mystery of affect, and in the remote corners of memory, where the bond is—and has always been—ancestral: the connection of the subject to land, to people, to story.

Mateus Dutra has become a kind of raizeiro of “pau-à-toa.” Whether or not we know exactly what healing he seeks through these endlessly repeated roots, we do know this: their drawing produces uninterrupted movement—a search that never ceases.