Arthur Luiz Piza: Piza – 1947/2015

Piza – 1947/2015 celebrates the partnership of over 40 years between Galeria Raquel Arnaud and Arthur Luiz Piza (b. 1928, São Paulo). Curated by Ricardo Sardenberg, the exhibition – which happens in parallel to the artist’s solo show at Estação Pinacoteca – comprises paintings, watercolors, gouaches, drawings, reliefs and sculptures that illustrate the trajectory of this important Brazilian artist, based in Paris.

For the curator, the show isn’t a retrospective of the artist’s career or an exhibition divided in chronological phrases, nor it relates Piza’s production to the many influences of artistic currents of his time. Piza – 1947/2015 searches for poetical movements in the work that first appear in his early years, and are reworked throughout his artistic trajectory, originating a vocabulary that we recognize in his production through forms and volumes in prints, drawings and sculptures.

Sardenberg suggests that we can see, in the works from the 1940s and 50s, a young Piza searching for his own expression code. The surrealistic influence in his paintings and drawings is present in sometimes monstrous and sometimes erotic figures. Formal constructions begin to arise intuitively – a fact that the curator attributes to exercises of automatic writing. For the curator, the contrast of the most known phase of his production (the mature one) with the young artist paradoxically reveals a continuity force that enlightens Piza’s production until the present. Sardenberg says that “One shouldn’t think that one phase holds preponderance over the other, but, on the other hand, what one sees is that one phase feeds from the other dialectically, hence the richness of the work as a whole”.