Fernando Velloso by Himself

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.

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