Alfredo Volpi

Audio commentary

MoMA has a painting from the Hour Glass series in its collection. They also have one of the most important selections of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi — arguably the most famous of which is the "Endless Column (version I)" from 1918. The piece takes the pyramid shape and multiplies it, in a way that turns it into a pillar. Both of the works by Brancusi and Volpi suggest infinite repetition.

Untitled (from the Hourglass series)

Academic

collector

Curator

gallerist

In the mid 1940s, Volpi began using tempera, bringing a transparency to the work. It coincides with the moment when he stopped painting from observation, working almost exclusively in his studio, and from memory. In the 50s, he fully removed perspective from his compositions of façades and entered a much more ‘synthetic' phase.

Untitled

Paulo Pasta

“Something I care about in my work is the non-separation between “what” and ”how” [to paint]. Trying to build a harmonious system where “what to paint” and “how to paint” reference each other. My motives are very similar to setting up a stage. It seems like a scene will take place, but nothing ever happens,” he explains.

Elizabeth Jobim

“These works are composed by stacking, positioning, cutting parts and placing them side by side. Very simple forms, which are never drilled together. We could say they also look like Volpi’s façades,” the artist states. “The line of separation is also the line of unity.”

Untitled, Jazida Series

Straighter brushstrokes became a characteristic of Volpi’s work from the 1970s. And these are known to be done from the right to the left. Volpi stretched his own canvases, and after 1973 he stopped using nails to attach the canvas to the wood bars, and instead used a stapler.

The works shown in this exhibition were all done recently, during these very uncertain times. “I let my paintings follow their own dynamic, its internal movement. The painting I do today prepares the ones of tomorrow — painting invites painting. It “makes you see” and, mainly, makes me see. The painting seems to dispense my will, or my deliberation, and invention. And therefore, it also escapes my control. I think that only like that it can be in front of me, be bigger than me. And I prefer it that way. Only then does it assume a role of invention, of discovery.”

“There is a suggestion of passage between one part and the next that could be seen as the “organic line”, something that already happened in my paintings. In this case, 1+1 isn’t equal to 2, the real meaning only comes through with this encounter. It is through approximation that it becomes a whole.”

Besides the relationship between colors, the transitions between shapes, and the possibilities of these encounters, Pasta also describes how he feels: “If I touch the canvas, I am also touched by it. It is a reciprocal operation that I appreciate.”

Also in the 1970s, Volpi becomes even more interested in color. He would revisit motives from earlier decades, but using a much more colorful palette. The tension between colors heightens the suggestion of three-dimensionality. He was very interested in pigments – and preparing his own paints. Collectors would often bring new pigments to him, knowing how much he would appreciate it.

Fachada (Façade) 

The exhibition features Elizabeth Jobim’s sculptures, although she is primarily known as a painter. In fact, her painted work already had sculptural qualities, involving the juxtapositioning of multiple canvases. “These works reference architecture and art history, and are like bases that unfold into works. Balance, which is a very dear concern throughout sculpture history, also appears here,” she says.

Pasta cites Brazilian writer Machado de Assis as a signifcant inspiration in his work. “Time is an invisible fabric on which everything can be embroidered, a flower, a bird, a lady, a castle, a tomb. You can also embroider ‘nothing’. Nothingness on top of invisibility is the most subtle work in this world, and, even of the other.”

Regarded as a master in Brazilian art history, but perhaps less known internationally, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896-1988) has had a deep impact on many artists, in his lifetime and after – an artist’s artist. This exhibition aims to present his work by juxtaposing it with that of Paulo Pasta (b. 1959) and Elizabeth Jobim (b. 1957), two of Brazil’s most important living artists. Josef Albers’ seminal 1963 text “Interaction of Color,” in which he muses on how we perceive colors, offers us a way to establish a conversation between Volpi’s paintings and the work of Pasta and Jobim. Albers compares the relationship of colors in a work of art to that of notes in music, writing that “hearing music depends on the recognition of the in-between of the tones, of their placing and of their spacing.” In Volpi, Pasta and Jobim’s work this in-between is best understood as a suspended instant, recognizable in everyday transitions such as between breathing in and breathing out. Volpi, Pasta and Jobim each try to pry open these cracks to pursue the mysteries within. Their works invite us as viewers to enter an unnamable space, one where, magically, the entire world can fit.

I organize and curate pop-up art exhibitions, typically showcasing up and coming artists based in New York.

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