Octávio Araújo

This 1949 self-portrait is representative of Octávio Araújo's initial production. The artist was then in his 20s, had studied painting at the Escola Profissional Masculina do Brás and started exhibiting in group shows, many of them organized by the participants themselves. At that time, Araújo was on the eve of his first trip to Europe, to study printmaking in Paris, France. Back in Brazil, in 1951, the artist decided to establish residence in Rio de Janeiro and, for a brief period, worked as an assistant to the painter Candido Portinari.

After this experience, Octávio Araújo's production would institute the particularities of his visual vocabulary, increasingly related to that of surrealism. Gradually, his engravings and paintings are populated with hybrid creatures and fragmented human bodies, which appear between architectural ruins, a strange, exaggerated nature, and several references borrowed from Western art since the Renaissance. His works thus organize meetings between beings, objects, spaces and images that are incongruous with each other and with reality.

The way Octávio Araújo portrays himself in this painting belonging to the Pinacoteca’s collection is, in comparison with his later work, more rough, dirty and expressive, with color spots and distortions in the figuration, especially in the lower half.

This area of ​​the image is dominated by the artist's shirt. More precisely, for the shirt worn by the artist during painting sessions, hence the red and yellow paint marks, almost like flames. In this sense, it seems to be a metalanguage exercise, in which colors appear as what they are (paint stains) and for the representation of paint stains.

The brushstrokes, by the way, are in evidence in this painting. In most of the canvas, it is possible to follow the brush path determined by the artist. Also, the thick and pasty materiality of the oil paint is frank and clear, for example, in the wrinkled fabric of his shirt.

Octávio Araújo's absorbed appearance contrasts with the momentum and speed of the brushstrokes that shape his face, facial expression marks and a subtle play of light (on the left)...

...and shadow (on the right).

Still in the upper half of the painting, Araújo's apparently attentive, calm and thoughtful state contrasts with the red, vibrant and discontinuous background.

In its intensity, this background plays a decisive role and reinforces the “warmth” of the image, made to represent its author in full activity or immediately after work.

What you see here, however, is a young Octávio Araújo with signs of toil still hot, printed on the clothes he wears.