Domicio Pedroso

Museums are living spaces of knowledge that increase their repertoire and provide unique experiences to their audiences. By presenting the exhibition by this important artist from Curitiba, Domício Pedroso, who left us exactly ten years ago, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum does more than that. We find here belonging and appreciation for local culture.

As the largest art museum in Latin America, with a collection of 14 thousand works, MON has a vocation for visual arts, architecture, and design, with an emphasis on Brazilian art, especially art from Paraná. Artists from our state are always present in exhibitions and the institution's permanent collection. Establishing constant dialogues between them and their works with our visitors is one of MON's main objectives. 

In the exhibition “Domício Pedroso: a Tessitura Urbana como Poesia” (“Domício Pedroso: Urban Texture as Poetry”), the public will find around 85 works, colored or monochromatic, which reveal a cross-section of the artist’s vast production. Widely recognized for his ability to combine artistic techniques and styles, Domício has always created a unique, intuitive, and innovative style.

Divided into four sections, the exhibition takes the public to “Paris e Viagens, as Marinhas” (“Paris and Travel, the Seas”, “Autorretratos e Retratos” (“Self-Portraits and Portraits”), “Casarios e Favelas” (“Townhouses and Favelas”) and “Nova Figuração: Caminhos para a Abstração” (“New Figuration: Paths to Abstraction”). These are the artist’s themes, as diverse as they are interesting.

We realize, when admiring such works, how art can communicate without words, allowing a link between people, worlds, and experiences. Enjoy it!

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Director-president of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Domício Pedroso's artistic career is marked by erudition and diversity: cultural animator, regional director of Funarte, exhibition photographer, curator, and, fundamentally, painter and engraver. Deep in the language of painting, a specialist in engraving, and a pioneer in artistic and commercial screen printing, he taught different techniques and worked on planning and assembling exhibitions (expography), in addition to carrying out brilliant curations.

This exhibition aims to provide a retrospective of his artistic production and his role in Brazilian cultural life. The exhibition highlights the artistic energy of paintings, drawings, and prints on themes from Seas to Favelas and Urban Agglomerates (in which the artist achieves a certain degree of abstraction). It covers his vast artistic production, from the 1950s to recent times, revealing the singularity of Domício's poetics, originally constructed in the gap between realism, cubism, and abstraction.

When he reached abstraction, he revealed himself to be a strongly intuitive artist. Intuition is not a mystical force but a work that does not dispense with reason; it is a constructive work. It is a deep way of seeing and perceiving, in which the eye is already spirited. Boats, houses, townhouses, overlapping houses, tangled surfaces of the roofs of shacks and slums, urban agglomerations... Forms that attracted the painter so much and that equally fascinate us.

His painting emerges from the great debate between figuration and abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s. He believed that all experiences and visions were reminiscent of reality. Starting from the most conventional, objective, realistic landscape, the artist simplifies and geometrizes until he creates images—or suggestions of images—that call for the observer's interpretation. Eliminating the lines of flight from a central perspective, he seeks the spatial structuring of the fabric of cities, giving rise to all of his poetics. From this personal look, the artist extends his vision to universal beauty.

Fernando Bini
Maria José Justino

Like every imaginative artist, Domício is a great traveler, both in the real and in the imaginary dimension. From the boats and sloops of Bahia to the gondolas of Venice and the old fishing boats of Volendam, the artist travels through Brazilian landscapes—the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the shacks and settlements of Curitiba, the festival of colors in the stained glass windows of Chartres and Paris—through so many streets in so many places, giving rise to various imaginations. The artist invites us on deep journeys in the joy of discovering new worlds through the charm of ar

Self-portraits are always a conversation with intimacy. We find in Domício's self-portraits a certain detachment, someone who does not expose himself, a certain proximity to Cézanne's impersonality. But we also find, in portraits of him painted by other artists, different ways of trying to understand him: absorbed in De Bona, lyrical in Massuda, reserved in Wollerman, Cézannian in Wong. A difficult soul to reach. A deeply enigmatic man.

In Morro do Cabrito (RJ), Domício “felt the pictorial side of favelas, which, alongside their social problems, also offers an example of community integration” (Aramis Millarch). This first contact had a profound impact on his work, revealing a great empathy for the organic architecture of the favelas, which would occupy his palette and his imagination.

From New Figuration to Abstraction, Domício balances between cubism and abstraction and expands the constructive sense without reaching a stricto sensu abstraction, always trusting in intuition. Intuition demands a return to the phenomena (favelas), in which the forms fade away, and the allusive figuration is attenuated, denying all perspective and affirming the frontality of the pictorial surface. His painting asserts a new meaning in the use of horizontals, verticals and aplats, which gain sensual contours with the use of color. In abstract art, he appropriates transcendence.  Inverno em Paris (Winter in Paris, 1961) and Comspiração Branco e Preto (Black and White Conspiracy, 2007) are perhaps the works closest to abstraction, ascending to a true game between verticals and horizontals, a procedure adopted in his last works. But it's the rudeness of the city that captivates him. It's a long road until the moment in which its favelas say goodbye to mere figuration and achieve refinement. He does not slip into geometric asepsis, being safe from it through the seduction of color. The path of purification and simplification takes place gradually, and it is this exercise that allows him an increasingly greater purification that leads him to flow into lyrical abstraction—an occasion in which geometric rigor definitively gives way to the order of the sensible and the rudeness of the city. Succumbs to lyricism, in which colors and lights create the party.