Lucca (Italia), 1896 – São Paulo (Brasil), 1988
By Francisco Alambert
Resident in Brazil since the age of one and a half, son of poor Italian immigrants, Alfredo Volpi began painting walls and frescoes in the houses of the wealthy from a very young age. With that artisanal experience, he developed a technique that he maintained throughout his life, based on the use of natural pigments and the fabrication of his own canvases and brushes. It wasn’t until 1914 that he executed his first work, and in 1925, he began to participate in collective exhibitions. Until the 1930s, his painting was marked by the naturalistic imprint of forms and colors, resolved through gestures that sometimes recalled Impressionism and sometimes Expressionism.
Without having taken formal courses, Volpi turned to the conquest of geometric abstraction, in an increasingly experimental and radical painting. In the 1930s, he joined the Santa Helena Group, an association of marginal artists, true “workers of modern art.” It wasn’t until 1941 that he held his first solo exhibition. In the 1940s, he began to shift towards a very particular geometric abstraction. Increasingly interested in the landscapes of the small cities near São Paulo, especially in their houses and customs, he progressively abandoned traditional perspective, simplifying and geometrizing the forms.
In 1950, he visited his native Italy for the first time. Upon his return, he was welcomed by the strong concrete movement and gained national and international recognition thanks to the São Paulo Biennials; in 1951 he presented works at the I Biennial and received the National Painting Award at the II Biennial. He also participated in the III, IV (with a special room), and XV biennials, as well as the XXVII Venice Biennale. In 1957, his first retrospective took place at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro.
By then, the pennants of the June festivals and the designs of doors and windows of old houses already stood out in his painting, occupying space and highlighting pure forms as well as emblems of a sweet, communal, and popular memory. Tempera painting definitively became the suitable technique for his constructions of chromatic optical schemes, abstracted in the infinite variations of movement and color of his pennants and ribbons, peculiarly illuminated, thus paradoxically embodying a worn and artisanal air. Despite having achieved fame, Volpi never left Cambuci, the neighborhood where he grew up. In 1986, the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in São Paulo held the exhibition “Volpi 90 Years.”
Content updated on 05/21/2017 22:53
