Brazil: Tempera reimagined

Brazil’s most influential proponent of tempera painting was Alfredo Volpi, the son of Italian immigrants, who turned to the medium after seeing examples by Giotto, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca on his travels in Italy. Mixing his own paints became a necessity in the face of Brazil’s extortionate import taxes on artist’s materials, but also allowed for unparalleled control over the quality and brilliance of his colours. Upon adopting tempera as his medium, he simplified his compositions, essentialising the city around him into geometric forms. The exhibition includes an example of Volpi’s iconic Bandeirinhas paintings depicting bunting strung across the streets. Painted in deep purple and electric blue, it depicts a city that vibrates with colour, even as the light fades to dusk.

Though her figurative practice was a sharp rejection of the geometric abstraction that had come to dominate Brazilian art, Eleonore Koch’s work retains a Brazilianness through her choice of medium, the purity and intensity of colour, her paintings’ heavy atmosphere and her short brushstrokes, like brickwork, positioning her in concord with both Volpi and Saldanha. Koch was Volpi’s only student in the discipline of tempera, using his recipe and pigments to produce a body of work that shares his palette as well as his search for the ‘resolution of the painting,’ her landscapes serving as a field in which to perfect the relationships between line, colour and space.