• The revival of tempera painting in the twentieth century was not unique to Brazil, but in no other country did it embed itself so deeply and essentially in its artistic culture. So abundant from the 1950s onwards, the pure, luminous colour and rhythmic brushwork of tempera painting has come to embody the palette and texture of Brazil at the moment of its arrival to modernity.
     
    Cecilia Brunson Projects presents Brazil: Tempera Reimagined, a group exhibition dedicated to this painting discipline. Featuring works by Alfredo Volpi (1896 – 1988), currently spotlighted in the RA exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism; Ione Saldanha (1919 – 2001); Eleonore Koch (1926 – 2018) and André Ricardo (b. 1985), the exhibition follows the continuity and reinterpretation of this medium by new generations as they enter into a shared pictorial world.

  • Alfredo Volpi, Untitled, 1960, tempera on canvas, 33.8 x 47 cm (13 1/4 x 18 1/2 in)

  • 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.

  • Ione Saldanha was also influenced by the rapidly growing city and its architectural forms, whose intersecting planes can be read...
    Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bobinas [Spools], c. 1971, tempera on wood, 65 x 65 x 34 cm
    (25 5/8 x 25 5/8 x 13 3/8 in)

    Ione Saldanha was also influenced by the rapidly growing city and its architectural forms, whose intersecting planes can be read in the geometric arrangement of her tempera experiments. Embracing the translucency of the paint, she alternates between the full saturation of sunlight and washes of blues and purples that rest on the surface like shadows. The exhibition features works from her Bambus [Bamboos] and Bobinas [Spools] series, in which she abandons the flat surface of the canvas to dissect the city in all its dimensions.

  • Saldanha's Bobinas utilise the spools she saw around the city, used for storing industrial cables. With her interventions, they are transformed into light toys, or delicate flowers. Her Bambus, celebrated in the 2024 Venice Biennale, play with the city on the vertical axis - stacks of buildings climbing up the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro - and on the horizontal axis - a continuous line of architecture experienced only as one encircles the painting and views it from all sides.
     
    "Ione’s city is constructed not with a builder’s plumb line (there are no rigid straight lines) but with the sensitive cement of color. And this, like the straight line, never appears in its pure state, but is instead porous and sensual matter, the result of thousands of combinations, arrangements, and approaches." - Frederico Morais1
     
  • Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bambus [Bamboos], 1970s (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bambus [Bamboos], 1970s (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bambus [Bamboos], 1970s (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bambus [Bamboos], 1970s (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
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    Ione Saldanha, Untitled, from the series Bambus [Bamboos], 1970s

  • "Due to their material roughness, the Bambus absorb the colour vibration, diminishing it and leaving visible small brushstrokes that slow the gaze … They are not on bamboo but are bamboo itself. The color accumulates on their surface without undoing the knots." - Luiz Camillo Osorio2

  • Eleonore Koch, Untitled, 1992, tempera, pastel and collage on paper. Paper: 21 x 28 cm (8 1/4 x 11 1/8 in). Frame: 37 x 41 cm (14 5/8 x 16 1/8 in)

  • 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.

  • Koch typically worked from studies on paper, later translated to canvas; she annotated the margins with the pigments used to...
    Detail: Eleonore Koch, Untitled, 1992, tempera, pastel and collage on paper

    Koch typically worked from studies on paper, later translated to canvas; she annotated the margins with the pigments used to mix each paint. Her works on paper, which she described as 'rehearsals,' reflect the meticulous efforts behind each composition, as she sought to perfect the communication between colours above all else. Her unusual perspective has been likened to 14th century Italian painting, from where her teacher Volpi developed his appreciation for egg tempera. Through the unique qualities of tempera, Koch revives their stillness and bright clarity.

  • Working today in São Paulo, André Ricardo works exclusively with tempera, having committed years to studying both the technique and its history. He extends the use of architecture as a structural base to explore geometric and colour relations, and to celebrate the expanses of São Paulo and its bright, clear light, radiating from his canvases. 
     
    "When I’m thinking of chromatic relations, I try to access this memory of color that reminds me of something in my cultural background. The folk culture expressed in our religious celebrations, festivities, music, dance, architecture… Something that is part of our life in some way even if you’re not affiliated with a specific group. 
     
    I feel that in my paintings, I am looking for other possibilities to see the world. I remember I have these colors inside of myself so when I’m painting, I’m discovering my background, and preserving this pleasure or sensibility." - André Ricardo3
  • Ricardo considers himself in the lineage of Volpi, Saldanha and Koch, the use of tempera and its idiosyncrasies allowing him...
    André Ricardo, Untitled, 2024, tempera on linen, 55 x 35 cm (21 5/8 x 13 3/4 in)

    Ricardo considers himself in the lineage of Volpi, Saldanha and Koch, the use of tempera and its idiosyncrasies allowing him entry into the same visual realm. Moreover, he advances a dialogue around Brazilian identity today, including its anthropophagic inheritance of European culture and a fluid embrace of religion and spirituality, reflecting the artist’s own mixed European, African and indigenous heritage. Ricardo’s position in the exhibition affirms tempera’s continuity – a Brazilian tradition reimagined by each new generation.

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  • 1. Frederica Morais, 'Bobinas and Emphilhados or the City of Ione,' in Ione Saldanha: The Invented City (São Paulo: MASP, 2021), p. 274
    2. Luiz Camillo Osorio, 'Ione Saldanha: To Live Color, To Inhabit Time,' in Ione Saldanha: The Invented City (São Paulo: MASP, 2021), p. 50