Serenade

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti’s art portrays Brazilian life on the outskirts of his native Rio de Janeiro. He painted common folk, the inhabitants of the hills, along with their customs and trades and, in particular, their music: samba, a genre with African roots and one of the primary expressions of Brazilian culture. More than any other artist, Di Cavalcanti was able to capture the lyricism, sensuality, and romanticism of Rio’s people in his poetic scenes of daily life. In the nineteen-twenties, he became friends with São Paulo-based intellectuals like Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Guilherme de Almeida. He was even one of the organizers of the Modern Art Week in that city in 1922, designing a catalogue and poster for the event that included work of his authorship. An illustration characteristic of his art was featured in the third issue from the second period of the celebrated Revista de Antopofagia. "Seresta" was produced for issue 517 of Para todos magazine, published on November 10, 1928. While the cover was polychromatic, almost all of the contents were printed in a single color. (Two-color printing was used for a few pages of the magazine, specifically in photographs of film actors and in artists’ contributions, mostly illustrations.)
A self-taught illustrator who worked extensively in the graphic arts, Di Cavalcanti embraced the magazine’s technical restriction in his painting. Brown was his preferred color for monochromatic works where shadowing is used to render volumes—an art deco-like strategy. After returning from Europe, he attempted to bring together his experiences with the avant-gardes there and the language of his home in works that dealt with nationalist themes and social issues. Seresta would serve as a sketch for his 1929 Samba. In both works the composition relies on the use of volumes and shadows, but in the latter one he added the vibrant colors characteristic of his pictorial palette. The murals Di Cavalcanti began painting for the João Caetano theater in Rio de Janeiro in 1929 are also akin to "Seresta" in theme and composition.