By Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Pintura
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Fernando Velloso by himself
“My painting is chained together like a ladder, each new painting has a reference to the previous one. One life may be too short to make a good painting, so you can’t jump from one branch to another. The artist needs to maintain coherence until the end of his life, mainly because suddenly, he no longer has the spirit for dangerous adventures”, says Velloso.
To turn to Velloso is to allude to one of the deepest and most consequential artists, who has been inscribed in the history of contemporary art since the 1950s. His work is an open field for experiences in the dialogue between Cubism and Abstract Art. He is devoted to conjugating matter with freedom, intelligence with sensitivity, knowledge with unknowledge, nature with production. Freedom, intuition and limits. He reconciles subjectivity with ambiance, technique with poetics.
Viaro was a beacon amid Academicism at the School of Fine Arts. Then the shock, with the 1st Sao Paulo Biennial and, finally, Lhote, in Paris. In Viaro, he found the method; at the Biennial, modernity; with Lhote, opening up to the world.
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Convinced that abstraction was the way, he became one of the most consistent artists of his generation, with a painting that has been registering coherence, purification and refinement. He elaborates a representative painting without being figurative.
Even if the form does not lead him to psychology or history, his arrival at abstraction does not reach the radicality of pure sensibility. In him reason and sensitivity fight for a free play, and there is no winner.
Even though his main desire was to be an artist, a painter par excellence, his training in law also led him to cultural management, creating the Museum of Contemporary Art of Parana, in addition to having served in several cultural positions in public administration and having been a representative in the most diverse artistic associations, promoting the integration of Parana in the Brazilian context.
Undisputed, Velloso turned 90 years old with an enviable youth. In the life of mortals, he differentiates himself as an intelligent, cultured person, with a unique sense of humor; in the art world he remains a radical artist, without compromise, his hand and eye increasingly refined, in a total commitment to the act of painting.
Fernando Bini and Maria José Justino
Curators
First trials
“My universe in the small and provincial Curitiba of that time was restricted to the flower gardens and the large yard full of fruit trees in my house and to the primary school classes in the building annex to the Normal School, later, Institute of Education…At the beginning of 1948, I was immediately informed of the opening of the School of Music and Fine Arts and was one of the first to enroll in the Painting Course. (…) In this universe, which I was not excited about, there was a dissonant voice, that of the Italian painter Guido Viaro. (…)”Viaro was the opposite of the entire School. He was the agitator, the anarchist who would burn down the house. The spiritual father who brought us out of darkness.” Fernando Velloso
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Cubist phase
“I have a feeling that people are born artists. [Hans] Arp said that art explodes inside the artist like the fruits on a tree.”“I attended the academy of the French master André Lhote, a renowned artist and Cubist theorist, in his studio at 18 Rue d’Odessa, in Montparnasse (…) I owe old Lhote much of my pictorial evolution, especially with pure aesthetics.” Fernando Velloso
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Abstract phase
“From the first year in Paris, I discovered the exploding abstraction. What I saw in the galleries and museums made me realize that I had traded one academy for another. I started to do some things at home, but I couldn’t show them because Lhote hated abstract painting. Despite that, he pushed you towards it. (…)”“When I returned from Paris doing abstract painting, I noticed a huge impact on the community, a lot of people were enthusiastic. I don’t say that I influenced, but I encouraged.” Fernando Velloso
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Interior Landscape II (1970) by Fernando VellosoOscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Violet Horizontal Painting (1968) by Fernando VellosoOscar Niemeyer Museum
Pictorial phase
“I don’t see any values in my work other than specifically plastic ones. A long time ago I came to the conclusion that painting is making sensitive a surface that has been limited. The transfer of this sensitivity to the viewer is the purpose of this creative activity.”“Painting is something intimate, lonely.” Fernando Velloso
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Feelings In A Magician Summer (2002)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Photographic Record of the Exhibition Fernando Velloso by Himself (2020)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Emerging Night Structures (1998)Oscar Niemeyer Museum
Emerging Presence At Evening (1991) by Fernando VellosoOscar Niemeyer Museum
Beyond The Inner Path (1989) by Fernando VellosoOscar Niemeyer Museum