Alfredo Volpi

Alfredo Volpi was born in Italy in 1896 and emigrated with his family to Brazil when he was two years old. He was one of a group of around 1.4 million people who emigrated from Italy to Brazil between 1870 and 1920. Over the decades, he gradually developed a completely self-taught style. It is an independent style that shows how Volpi always kept his distance from current trends in art. He was also an inventive craftsman, making his own paints and materials, and stretching and priming his own canvases. From the 1930s he used the old technique of egg tempera. This involved using egg yolk diluted with water as a binder and mixing it with pigments. He also distanced himself from the usual theories of colour and composition, solving his painterly problems intuitively. His remarks on this were as simple as they were apt:

“You add the first colour. Then you look. Then you add the second colour. Then you look again. If it’s right, you see it. If not, you see that too, and then you wipe it off and start again.”

In the late 1930s, Volpi turned his attention to urban and architectural scenes in a small city about 60 kilometres from São Paulo: Mogi das Cruzes. The architecture and parts of it that recalled the city’s colonial past, such as windows, doors, roof tiles and even facades, served as motifs for Volpi’s colour field paintings, and he used colour to achieve certain effects.

The chapel in this picture is squeezed in between the colourful facades of the surrounding houses. It looks tiny – almost like a doll’s house. Much is only hinted at, almost drowned out by the bright colours. Only a few window crosses, the cross on the gable of the church and the spire are painted in greater detail.