Guerre et Paix de Portinari
May 7 – June 9 2014
Dear Shaded Viewers,
At the foot of the Champs-Elysees, the Grand Palais is one of those enormous, photo-worthy buildings that you really do see in every photo. On a regular basis its architectural marvel of a skeleton is filled out with art. Yet there is one problem: the entrance. Finding the correct entrance on first go is a testament to true art-savvy orientation skills; a few wrong doors, and you begin to feel the building is an impenetrable fort holding goodies you want to see and can’t touch.
And you just want that taste of that candy.
Guerre et Paix de Portinari, a retrospective of Candido Portinari (1903-1962), considered, as Jorge Amado’s (Brazilian writer) wall-emblazoned words state, a painter of his time born from “colour, poetry, drama, hope of the people, with his paintbrushes touching on their realities: the earth, Brazilian people, peasants, immigrants, children, saints, circus artists and animals, the countryside… the materials from which he is working and constructing”. And that is exactly what you feel upon entering.
You walk into a quiet drawing salon with elaborately framed drawings that display brutish but impassioned pencil strokes depicting figures in their purest form: standing, their feet, their heads. It is an introduction to a fa
