Ivan Serpa: Expressions of the Concrete

The Ministry of Citizenship and Banco do Brasil present and sponsor Ivan Serpa: expression of the Concrete, a vast retrospective of one of the most important artists in modern and contemporary Brazilian art. After Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition will travel to São Paulo, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte.   Curated by Marcus de Lontra Costa and Hélio Márcio Dias Ferreira, this retrospective contains works from various collections and from a number of phases of this artist of multiple aesthetics and techniques. Paintings from the Concretist period; works of an expressionist character, from the Negra phase, which the artist preferred to call Crepuscular; and works from the Op-Erótica, Amazônica, Mangueira and Geomântica which reveal the artist’s mystical facet. Serpa’s trajectory, however brief, left a significant mark on Brazilian art, by virtue of its sensibility, freedom and audacity.   With this project, CCBB reaffirms its commitment to making art accessible, presenting the work of one of the exponents of modernism in Brazil and his contribution to the cultural identity of the country. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil          

After the second World War, international modernism faced the challenge of aesthetically reconstructing the West, using the rationality of industrial serial processes, with the addition of humanistic and romantic sensitivity. In Brazil, a talented generation of artists appeared, in which the name of Ivan Serpa stood out from the start. Artist and master, restless creator, protagonist of a concretist movement that integrated international values and specific aspects of Brazilian reality.   Following a period of great repercussion of his geometric abstract works, the artist travelled to Europe. He came into direct contact with the great masters of painting and realised that he lacked technical knowledge in the craft of painting. On his return to Brazil, in the 1960s, he started experimenting with other languages. He produced works that related to the informal movements of abstraction, as well as to expressionist figuration, in addition to creating new graphic techniques.  He returned to geometric abstraction, sometimes mixed with figurativism and, towards the end of his career, did not hesitate to draw inspiration from mysticism.   Figuration appears in the series “Bichos” (“Animals”) and “Mulheres e Bichos” (“Women and animals”); they are blunt images, filled with violence and sensuality. Serpa absorbed this new scene and took possession of it in his own way, in a sensuous, dramatic and tense language, in which the female body is home to a baroque graphism. The violence of wars across the world and the overall feeling of frustration caused by the destruction of projects aimed at social and political transformation in Brazil would lead Serpa to announce, in a premonitory way, times of fear and lead. This is seen in the powerful pictorial screams of the sinister images in the series of paintings usually called “Negra”, but which the artist preferred to call, poetically, “Crepuscular”.   During his time as a restorer of rare works on paper, a function he performed as an employee of the National Library, he carefully observed the action of termites and produced works he called Anóbios, with a microscopic trajectory that outlined elaborate filigrees, small labyrinths observed and re-created by the artist. The strategies of pop art acted as an affirmation of liberty, as well as an essential instrument of creation. But it was through certain procedures of op art that the painter would recover the imposition of order, rhythm, modulation and graphics, which would lay down the aesthetic strategies of geometric art, still in the 1960s. His canvases were composed of articulated elements, games of assembling and loving, and his colours were vibrant, tropical and popular.   After so many images and so much life lived, the artist left his legacy in just two decades. But, before leaving us, he returned parabolically to his beginning and to his essence, producing his geometrical phase Geomântica. While some people required the painter to show a stylistic and aesthetic coherence, he responded with boldness and freedom. In the contemporary world, the artistic instance alone can provide creative and semantic action to the human being, thus preventing the large communication corporations from turning each user into a mere figure, incapable of articulating and defining the meanings connected to a virtual and global plot.  Examples such as Ivan Serpa’s are permanent lessons. They provide the tools for the creation of audacity and freedom essential to the human life.   Hélio Márcio Dias Ferreira and Marcus de Lontra Costa (curators)