The work of Alfredo Volpi (1896-1988) prompts several reflexions about the most notable of contemporary Brazilian painters. His work extends through most of the decades of this century, from the teens, when he begins to paint, until the '80s, the sunset of his life, and thus of his work. His painting is substantially refined in the '40s, a period during which the breadth of his potential as an artist is revealed.¹ A painter-painter, living to paint, Volpi is an example of an artist for whom art is the ultimate end. Volpi cared little for his career, in the sense used today of an artist projecting himself as a personality along a particular trajectory. Nothing could diminish or impede his passion for paints, for incessant and vital pictorial making. He could paint in a modest studio, or in a 3-by-4-meter room; what mattered was to have a canvas in front of him, which he himself stretched. Fabric over chassis, he would proceed to prepare the canvas, as he did the pigments with which he worked. Volpi, we could say, is our Morandi, with whom he has many affinities. Serene, and extremely serious about his painting, non-verbal, reflective, he realized his variations on a theme, color studies, in apparently similar canvases, taking pleasure in tonal or compositional differences. His is a silent painting, in dialogue with itself, in a gradual process of unfolding, much like still life painting, in which altering combined elements produces new games of vision. And, as Domingos Giobbi reminds us, the two great objects of Volpi's admiration in contemporary art were precisely Matisse and Morandi. This predilection is symptomatic: Matisse incarnates the pleasure of color, and Morandi chromatic subtlety; both are present, in distinct phases, in Volpi's work.²

Because of their apparent simplicity, Volpi's work and persona attract, from the '40s on, the critic and psychiatrist Theon Spanudis, as well as the critic and physicist Mžrio Schenberg, who wrote the catalogue for Volpi's first solo show, in 1944. Mžrio Pedrosa would be fascinated by Volpi's work from 1954 onwards, and would write about him in particular when he sees the retrospective at the Museum of Modern art in Rio de Janeiro in 1957, at that point proclaiming him the Brazilian master of his time.

Few departures in the course of his life take him away from his neighborhood, Cambuci, in Sâo Paulo: trips to Mogi das Cruzes and Itanhaem, at the end of the '30s, a brief voyage through the historic colonial towns of the state of Minas Gerais, in 1944-from where he brings canvases heavy with expressionistic tracings of religious street scenes-a trip to Bahia in 1954, and another to Cananëia, both with the critic Theon Spanudis. But the trip to Europe in April of 1950 would be full of emotion. There he spends six months, accompanied by two painter friends, Mžrio Zanini and Rossi Osir-ten days in Paris, most of the time in Italy, in Venice, where he spends 40 days. On this occasion he makes 18 trips to Padua to see Giotto's frescoes; goes to Rome, Naples, and Sicily.

In the '50s, artists in Sâo Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were also curious about the work of Volpi, who is interested in that decade by the work of the Concretes, without, however, ever becoming one of them, producing abstract geometrical works, when he observes, with the acuity that is particular to him in the application of his gaze, the experiments of those young men of the '50s. For Volpi, these works are exercises that he practices as in a game of variations that develop in studies of color, until they are exhausted, or in order to launch other experiments in which chromatic concerns dominate.

Mžrio Pedrosa makes a clear distinction between Portinari's "superb modeling," "classically separated from colors," emphasizing however his excellent draftsmanship, while "Tarsila, Volpi, Guignard, Pancetti, give colors for colors' sake. They love them." And he ends with the phrase: "Volpi is, then, the master of pure color in Brazil."³ In another text, Pedrosa-writing on Volpi's retrospective in Rio de Janeiro would say that it "represents Brazilian painting's cry for independence in the face of international painting or the Paris School."⁴ This affirmation comes close to that of the French critic Maurice Raynal in the '20s, in his reflections on Tarsila's painting of that decade.⁵ Both, as much the French critic as Pedrosa, based their remarks on the modern preoccupation with singling out an artist that could be identified with Brazil. An artist who, though impregnated, through his training in the visual field, with the work of various eras and artists that he admires, does not fail to bring to the canvas a particularity that has much to do with our reality. This preoccupation, political from the critic's point of view, to localize the artist in his space/time, corresponds to the posture of an entire generation that no longer exists-even though foreign specialists insist on wanting to identify our socio-political reality, and our tropical or subtropical visuality, with the work of our artists.

Perhaps this is the reason that foreign critics who wrote on Brazilian art often focused on artists such as Tarsila, Volpi, and Guignard as primitive or naive, as did the erudite Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest in 1945. Certainly some periods of the work of those artists may exude, despite the artists' training, an apparent simplicity. But this "simple" manner is an assumption of identification with the popular culture that surrounds us and envelops us in every way; whereas in others it is the result of a certain fashionableness, or "popularism," as the critic Mžrio Schenberg called it, referring to a valid tendency in the '30s and '40s, in artists of the Sâo Paulo group of artists of working-class origin. Or it can be configured as a will to transcendence, as is in part the case for Volpi.

This show of Volpi's work in the XXIV Bienal de Sâo Paulo does not present a complete panorama of his oeuvre, rather it attempts to be a slice of his work. In emerging from the strong expressive quality that marked his work of the '40s Volpi embarks on a marked reduction of compositional elements, strongly emphasizing the chromatic givens with which his work is concerned in a very particular way in the '50s and '60s. Volpi cannot be considered an anthropophagite, and he himself would turn his back on such a framework, as he would on anything theoretical in relation to his painting. The truth is that this artist, the greatest painter-I would like to reiterate, and there is nothing original in saying this-of our century in Brazil, projects an encounter with his roots through his visuality. In this light he can be seen as an artist affected by anthropophagy in art, which is only, in plain words, the incorporation of elements from other cultures, other kinds of information or repertoires that become mixed with our own visual traditions. And in Volpi's case this is done with rare skill.

In starting with a significant drawing by Volpi-of whom it is frequently said that he is not a draftsman-in Isaias Melsohn's collection, I perceive the matrix of many of his paintings from the '50s and '60s. (I posit that his works on paper are also pictorial, preambles to the paintings he would later realize.) A drawing-notation⁶-done probably on commission or just after his trip to Europe, and Venice, in 1950-projects elements of the vocabulary he would use in the years to follow: vertical façades, a boat in a shape that would later become a sail, as well as the small flag, and the mast. Symptomatically this drawing already registers the germs of his disembodied houses phase, as I like to refer to his "façades" from the early '50s. And, they can be seen in this small drawing, inspired by the slender architecture of the houses in Venice on the shore of the Adriatic, to the left of the drawing. These elements, masts and sails would populate his canvases in the '60s and '70s, elements which for me were enigmatic in origin until now⁷. At the same time, in an unexpected hybridity, small flags are also present here, though without the geometrics with which gradually he would project them. It is as if this drawing held a well-kept secret, the gene, as Melsohn says, of a vocabulary retained in the emotional and visual memory of this artist who later would elaborate them in repeated, altered versions for more than 15 years.

It's as if Volpi were working, for years, on the "intelligible objects" of which Baldinucci speaks, in defining "Idea" as the "Perfect knowledge of the intelligible object, acquired and confirmed by doctrine and use. Our artists (i nostri artefici) use this word when they want to speak of a very original and well conceived work (opera di bel capriccio, e d'invenzione)."⁸ For Volpi, originally from Lucca, these elements that he incorporated in his compositional variations, preoccupied with chromatic issues, are like familiar memories that, after this trip/encounter with his heritage, remain under the reach of his visuality, and that he reworks in endless exercises, in permanent labor. This, yes, an artifice that maintains intact the possibility of developing his "fantasy" starting with the "imitation" of the things that surround-and affect-him for their plastic, visual interest, and then turn into the object of his selection for creative ends.

When Hughes refers to Morandi's life without scandals or misadventures, a life that also remains aloof from the manifestos and countermanifestos of artistic life in the Italy of his time, the same profile can be sketched of Volpi, a refugee in Cambuci, in his studio in a working class neighborhood, in the middle of the incessant tumult of urban life in Sâo Paulo, and only in the last two decades of his life besieged by collectors and dealers. Maintaining the integrity of his posture as a rustic man, he avoided the mundanities that wished to envelop him, safeguarding his time for painting, his raison d'ètre. It is in this modesty, one could say, a modesty surrounded by the frivolity of the socio-artistic environment, that lies the great appeal for those who sought him out in his studio-refuge.

Nevertheless, which are the previous activities of this artist who is 54 years old in 1950, fully experienced as a painter, yet not included to represent Brazil by the curators of the first Bienal-just as Tarsila and Anita Malfatti were also not invited to that first historic event, and who signed up to be selected, as any emerging painter of the time would have done?