He comes from a tradition of self-taught painting. A professional house painter, he would, with his working-class companions, take advantage in his youth of his leisure time穡eekends穞o paint en plein air, or to capture scenes of his home life and his friends. In the �s he concentrated in painting suburban landscapes, and by the end of that decade and at the beginning of the �s his chromatic speculations became gradually more intense in his painting achievements. Even in the �s the light "dissolved" the forms of his figuration. But it was doubtless the attentive observation of the painting of a primitive from Itanhaem, Emigdio de Souza穉n academic disciple of the documentary academic Benedito Calixto穞hat made him valorize areas of color, juxtaposing them with definition. Even at the beginning of the �s the presence of Ernesto De Fiori would transform, in my view, Volpi藄 brushstroke: Volpi moves to drawing with color. In a certain way, Volpi is ready, from then on, for his great chromatic adventure of endless sketches. The simple quotidian (workers at table, seated seamstresses, a woman in front of a window, a midnight repast, a street in Itanhaem, the square of Itanhaem, a girl on a bicycle, a conversation at the end of the afternoon or a game of dominoes) is focused with mastery by Volpi. Often, the sensuality of the pictorial material imposes itself beyond pure chromatics, with the velvety texture of a Roman fresco from Pompei. Around 1944, Volpi abandons oil painting for tempera and egg, beginning to prepare his own pigments, and testing them for their resistance to the light of day. This artisanal procedure of obtaining colors is similar to his work in preparing his flawless straw cigarette, or to the preparation of his canvases which he mounted on specially ordered stretchers. As I had occasion to note earlier, for Volpi these stages of his work were not distinct from the artistic act of production itself, but, rather, diverse aspects of one creative act.⁹

In 1963 Murilo Mendes referred to Volpi藄 career as "the promotion of instinct to consciousness. For a long time he has been obsessed with destroying volume, with polishing color within the intentional limits of two-dimensionality."¹⁰ Perhaps this instinctive phase to which Mendes refers is that of the impressionist landscapes of the �s, in which forms come apart in the brushstrokes that cover the canvas gesturally穌rawing with color. Whereas from the mid �s on Volpi begins to distribute several planes throughout the canvas with greater economy, reducing the elements that comprise the composition, and containing the gesturality within a construction that with each canvas becomes more sober and moderate. The contained magic of "As costureiras" [The seamstresses] exemplifies the preamble of this period well. "Cata-ventos" [Weathervane] does as well; it belongs to the series of "toys" painted by the artist, and already signals the depuration so visible in the paintings of the �s穉 quasi-abstraction full of joy and rhythm frozen by the artist藄 will.

The house from the early �s can also be an elegant example of how Volpi draws from architecture/construction to develop his rhythmic façades, and, surprisingly, sometimes includes a mast that breaks the composition where the orthogonal dominates. An excellent example of his exemplary picturality, exuding in every pore the ambiance of our architecture from another era is "Casario de Santos" [Houses of Santos, main harbour city of the state of São Paulo], in which the encounter with the phase of the end of the �s can be perceived穒n the upper half of the canvas the sea still has visible fishing boats穉nticipating the reductionism through horizontal planes that he would elaborate in the �s, breaking the vertical surface of the canvas, with the central window of the background, hieratically placed, in a frontal dialogue with the viewer.

From that point on, the façades succeed one another in exercises of juxtaposed planes of color, narrowing, slender, and sometimes limited by the strips of horizontal planes. Already "Fachadas" [Façades] (Spanudis Gift, Museu de arte contemporânea da USP) and "Fachada" [Façade] (Saul Libman collection) are true abstractions that begin from a representation, within a visible constructivist line, the brushstroke tracking the rhythm and lucidity of Volpi in his contained facture.

This exercise in color穎igure/background穙n a red background as on a blue background with small flags in two colors, or in a single color, would have its variations in the canvases of white triangles on a monochromatic ground anticipating "Xadrez branco e vermelho" [White and red chess], as well as "Ladrilhos" [Tiles]. In truth, in seeing in Volpi藄 house that he himself drew his ruler, just as he drew his chess board, white and red, we see how these canvases are derived from this artisanal habitat (like Reverón who in his studio in Macuto made his own phone, his dolls, and other objects, as we had occasion to see穓ust as we observed that Torres-García drew his books, word by word, or painted a radio built for him in wood). These artists, like Volpi, are from the same tradition of joy in manual labor. In their retired life, they do not abandon a total dedication to work that is integrated with the quotidian. (And, unhappily for the greatness of human creativity, this is an extinguishing lineage, of which, after the death of Gonzalo Fonseca, Roberto Matta is certainly the last example in Latin America.)