During the 1950s and 1960s Alfredo Volpi found the aesthetic expression that was genuinely reflective of his artistic convictions. Awarded the Grand Prix for painting at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1953, Volpi was compared to Mark Rothko as a colorist of great magnitude. The works shown here present the formative aspects of his practice in these definitive decades. Volpi used to say that the synthesis of his work is line, color, and form, almost purely so, with remnants of underlying figuration. In the beginning of the 1950s when his first temperas with building facades and flags appeared, Volpi had been producing work for more than three decades. From the Cezannian landscape period, beginning in the 1920s, in which his subjects were almost sculpted with layers, his methods reflected the most important movements of European painting. Moreover, it was Volpi’s peculiar fusion of popular origins, with procedures assimilated from the main schools of European modernism, that gradually provoked a radical change in the physiognomy of Brazilian modernist painting and Concretism.
