Later I started painting from memory. I was trying to solve the problem of painting. The subject began to lose interest. All that remained was the problem of line, form and colour.
– Alfredo Volpi
The figure of Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988) looms large in contemporary Brazilian art – as a model, inspiration and even a challenge to subsequent generations of painters. Memories of Volpi abound: in painters’ palettes and brushstrokes; in their use of egg tempera; in their geometries and feeling for space; indeed in how they approach the relationship between painting and memory itself.
LAMB's latest ‘Dialogues’ exhibition presents significant works by Volpi alongside paintings by artists from subsequent generations who reflect on – and depart from – his example: the pioneering Concrete painter Judith Lauand (1922–2002), contemporary painters Fabio Miguez (b. 1962) and André Ricardo (b. 1985), and the multidisciplinary artist Diambe (b. 1993).
In the 1950s, and not least following his critical recognition at the second São Paulo Biennial in 1953, Volpi emerged as a representative figure of post-war Brazilian painting. With his flattened, abridged images of the façades of buildings (fachadas) and, later, in compositions that drew on familiar urban punctuation marks such as little flags (bandeirinhas) and flagpoles, he appeared at once an unsurpassable popular painter and the inventor of a knowingly modern idiom.
The works by Volpi exhibited here, Bandeirinhas e mastros (1950) and Untitled (Fachada com Bandeira Branca) (c. late 1960s/1970), exemplify his mature visual vocabulary. Their signature forms and colours are tethered to the artist’s world – to the art, architecture and experience of mid-century Brazil – but also strain gently away from it.
In this, Volpi’s paintings contrast with the premeditated abstraction of the Concrete movement, which from the 1950s in São Paulo sought out an art underpinned by mathematical rigour and liberated from representational content. Among its leading figures was Judith Lauand, the only woman artist in the influential Grupo Ruptura. Presenting a late work by Lauand, Untitled (1993), this exhibition offers an opportunity to consider how her rules-based art came to admit topographical elements, chiming with Volpi’s example. Triangles become mountainous; geometry alights on geography.
Volpi was a self-taught artist, the son of Italian immigrants who had grown up in the working-class district of Cambuci, São Paulo, training first as a carpenter and bookbinder before establishing himself as a decorative wall painter. Throughout his career, he would remain deeply sympathetic to vernacular modes and traditions, and above all, perhaps, to the artisanal skills – such as building frames for his canvases and grinding pigments – that set the rhythm for his life as a painter.
The works here by André Ricardo and Diambe chime with these sensibilities, albeit in their own distinctive contexts. Diambe, acutely alert to the meanings of materials in his paintings, sculptures and textiles, elects to paint in egg tempera, the medium that Volpi had so emphatically refreshed in mid-century Brazil. For the later artist, in works such as in SPIII (2024), tempera speaks of defiance, asserting its durability as both medium and material in the face of a deteriorating natural world.
Ricardo, meanwhile, inquires into a broader cultural background – one that intersects with, and moves beyond, Volpi’s work – which has informed both his practice and the contemporary Brazilian experience. Works such as China Town (2019) and Untitled (2023) are characteristic expressions of Ricardo’s commitment to a vernacular that encompasses the architecture and traditions of Brazil’s afro-diasporic populations, in both his native São Paulo and in Pernambuco in the northeast. His painting recollects, commemorates and proclaims neglected histories of Brazil.
In a sense, memory was the making of Volpi’s style. As a younger artist, he had explored modes of representational painting informed by various strains of realism, impressionism and post-impressionism. But in the 1940s two decisive transitions had precipitated an inward turn in his work. In taking up the medium of tempera, Volpi started to simplify his images (he later recognised an imaginative kinship with Italian trecento painting). He ceased working from sketches, prompting him to recollect and distil elements of the built world in compositions that essentialised and transformed them. Volpi began to paint the geometries that memory reveals.
That legacy registers in this exhibition in the work of Fabio Miguez. Miguez has previously described Volpi as a ‘short cut’ (atalho) whose work informed his own artistic development, particularly his decision in the early 1980s to transition from an architectural training to a career in painting. In recent work Miguez has depicted both pared-back buildings and – as in the works here – abstract compositions that might be cropped façades or even flat-packed structures. Their familiar pinks and greens feel hospitable to Volpi’s ghost – an invitation, perhaps, to co-habit pictorial space.
Critics have sensed the benevolent shadow of Volpi falling across the many diverging pathways of Brazilian post-war art – even, that is, in the animated forms and objects of Neo-Concrete pioneers such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. As ‘Dialogues: Memories of Alfredo Volpi’ demonstrates, Brazilian painters in particular continue to draw inspiration from his example. They have a knack for making Volpi’s famous doorways spring open.
Text by Thomas Marks