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Lot Essay
"Volpi paints volpis," Willys de Castro used to say simply and admiringly of his friend, an artist whose work bridged the Brazilian avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the popular iconography of his working-class background. The son of Italian immigrants, Volpi trained as a bookbinder and painter-decorator before embarking on a career as an artist. Self-taught, he worked through the 1930s in the company of São Paulo's Grupo Santa Helena, a loose affiliation of modern-minded artists whose paintings emphasized proletarian themes treated with a subdued, pictorial realism. Volpi's work began to shed these early, more obviously figurative elements by the mid-1940s as he came into contact with São Paulo's concretistas, with whom he shared a preference for compositional simplicity and pure colors. In his iconic paintings of the following decades, Volpi cultivated an intuitive and idiosyncratic approach to abstraction in which he transformed everyday motifs--façades, flags, arches, sails--into schematic geometries.
As curator Olívio Tavares de Araújo has remarked, Volpi's work "is born figurative, becomes abstract, again figurative, but this time passing on to conceive the same figuration in another way."[1] The signature flags, repeated across the entire surface of Bandeirinhas horizontais com mastro, epitomize this formal evolution. Starting with a popular, ubiquitous motif--the handmade paper decorations traditionally strung during the annual Festa de São João-- Volpi progressively distilled these found, geometric shapes, turning them into all-over abstractions. The colorful feast flags are in this way reimagined as a modular grid; distanced from national and sentimental cliché, the flags project modernist values of color and form within a dynamic, pentagonal pattern.
A superb colorist, Volpi achieved a clear, luminous quality of space and tone through his use of the traditional egg tempera technique. His choice to work in tempera may have stemmed from an early encounter with medieval art; Volpi reportedly visited Giotto's magnificent fresco cycle at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua eighteen times during a trip to France and Italy in 1950. Yet his emphasis on the structure and materiality of color--seen, for example, in brushstrokes that remain clearly visible on the canvas--relates as well to modern aesthetic values. Here, brightly multicolor flags wave in geometric unison, their forms laid out in a brilliant pattern of jewel-toned pigments. The painting's strong horizontal orientation is punctuated only by the candy-striped flagpole, a steadying check to the rhythmic movement of color unfolding across the canvas.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Olívio Tavares de Araújo, quoted in Claudia Laudanno, "Alfredo Volpi," Art Nexus 6, no. 65 (July-September 2007): 127.
As curator Olívio Tavares de Araújo has remarked, Volpi's work "is born figurative, becomes abstract, again figurative, but this time passing on to conceive the same figuration in another way."[1] The signature flags, repeated across the entire surface of Bandeirinhas horizontais com mastro, epitomize this formal evolution. Starting with a popular, ubiquitous motif--the handmade paper decorations traditionally strung during the annual Festa de São João-- Volpi progressively distilled these found, geometric shapes, turning them into all-over abstractions. The colorful feast flags are in this way reimagined as a modular grid; distanced from national and sentimental cliché, the flags project modernist values of color and form within a dynamic, pentagonal pattern.
A superb colorist, Volpi achieved a clear, luminous quality of space and tone through his use of the traditional egg tempera technique. His choice to work in tempera may have stemmed from an early encounter with medieval art; Volpi reportedly visited Giotto's magnificent fresco cycle at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua eighteen times during a trip to France and Italy in 1950. Yet his emphasis on the structure and materiality of color--seen, for example, in brushstrokes that remain clearly visible on the canvas--relates as well to modern aesthetic values. Here, brightly multicolor flags wave in geometric unison, their forms laid out in a brilliant pattern of jewel-toned pigments. The painting's strong horizontal orientation is punctuated only by the candy-striped flagpole, a steadying check to the rhythmic movement of color unfolding across the canvas.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Olívio Tavares de Araújo, quoted in Claudia Laudanno, "Alfredo Volpi," Art Nexus 6, no. 65 (July-September 2007): 127.