Overview
Juxtaposing organic and geometric forms, Luiz Zerbini’s paintings explore the relationship between colour, light and movement.
Juxtaposing organic and geometric forms, Luiz Zerbini’s paintings explore the relationship between colour, light and movement.
Luiz Zerbini was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1959. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Across his career, which spans over three decades, Luiz Zerbini has developed a complex visual vocabulary at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. He first emerged within the generational (and global) ‘return to painting’ of the 1980s, centred in Rio de Janeiro around the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts and subsequently defined by the landmark exhibition ‘Como vai você Geração 80?’ (How Are You Doing, 80s Generation?, 1984).
The grid — a formal leitmotif closely associated with modernism — heavily features in the artist’s recent paintings, a subtle nod to the mosaic pavements and façades of Brazilian tower blocks. Using it as a compositional structuring device, numerous works show geometric forms juxtaposed with lush, tropical flora. A cacophony of colour, these works convey the immersive and seductive quality of Brazil’s natural environment. Flooding the viewer’s perception, Zerbini tries to provide the impression of “being in the painting as you could be in a forest.” Palm fronds, coiled ferns and roughly textured tree trunks often encroach upon the works’ gridded structure. These forms merge with areas of abstract mark-making, demonstrating how the artist appropriates patterns found in nature and incorporates them into his own vernacular. The rhythmic structure of Zerbini’s paintings captures the movement of trees swaying in the breeze or bodies of cascading water, lending his works a striking dynamism.
