This “study sketch,” as it is called by its writer, Theon Spanudis, performs an in-depth analysis of the artwork created by Alfredo Volpi. It provides a brief review of articles written as of that time (1956) by the critics Mário Schenberg, Sérgio Milliet, and Lourival Gomes Machado. It also proposes a definition for this project, which was “strange and exceptional among our contemporary painters.” The essay starts off discussing the naturalistic appearance of Volpi’s early work. It goes on through the artist’s development in terms of color, form, and spatial relationships in works created from 1948 on, which were then presented at the first Bienal de São Paulo (1951). Regarding that transition period, when the artist began to prioritize chromatic relationships, comparisons were made between Volpi’s work and some by Henri Matisse. The writer rejects the opinion of Gomes Machado, who sees “an undeniable popular essence in Volpi’s painting,” referring to his early work. Spanudis believes that even if the painter feels an “attraction” for aspects of popular culture, his painting is “highly complex” and cannot be reduced to its popular, primitive, or ingenuous elements. To the writer, “in essence,” the artist’s approach to painting reveals a painter of a “classic” bent in search of “new compositional media” with which to execute his “new view of reality through pure color and tones.”

This essay by Theon Spanudis—poet, art critic, and psychoanalyst—considers paintings by Alfredo Volpi to be distinguished in the Brazilian art world, even “in the sphere of international art,” compared to Piet Mondrian. If Mondrian, in his time, discovered space as the “essential prime mover of universal reality,” the painter Volpi (born in Lucca, Italy, and living in São Paulo) has a similar relationship with color. In his artwork, the chromatic aspect has gone from being a “vehicle that sends a message or provokes us in the midst of some sensory or emotional response” to having its own “higher and almost absolute existence.” 

Spanudis describes the “concretizing” element of the chromatism in the Volpi’s pictorial approach during the first half of the 1950s, seen in rectilinear compositions that represent the façades of houses and other streetscapes in São Paulo. The artist reaches a point of capturing a certain immateriality (in very fine layers of color), which he works through “vibration, expansion, and limitation,” leading to a dynamic pictorial equilibrium. The resulting paintings appear to be the work of an artist beyond life’s daily hustle, a person with a complex view of the world who is able to reach a universal concept of existence.

Born in Turkey, Theon Spanudis (1915–1986) grew up in Greece, was educated in Vienna, and emigrated to Brazil in 1950, where he worked as a psychoanalyst until 1956. He then decided to take up literary and art criticism. He was a regular contributor to Habitat revista das artes no Brasil, edited by the architect Lina Bo Bardi. In 1959, Spanudis was an adherent and signer of the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959). Just a few years later, he took a less radical stance and even criticized the Neo-Concrete movement, led by Ferreira Gullar.