artnexus #95

José de Souza Oliveira Filho (Pernambuco, 1952) adopted his artistic name, Macaparana, from his native city, located 84 kilometers from Recife. After a brief stay in Rio de Janeiro, he settled in São Paulo, where he has lived since 1963. 

A self-taught artist, Macaparana has produced paintings, sculptures, and design, and has gone through several creative periods in his career. After his initial landscapes, where Pernambuco’s Sertão was the protagonist, and his later exploration of the theme of ex-votos or religious offerings, he developed an interest in geometry and orbited around a significant movement in the history of abstract art in Brazil, Concretism. His dialog with concrete art reinforced his contact with a sensible, subtle geometry that appeals to the memory of the materials used. Austere compositions where the line, circle or square, among other geometric figures, build a suggestive visual language with color playing a central role. Macaparana explores color by mixing pigments until he reaches the desired hue: “If I am doing red, I mix several colors because it is already in my mind.” 

For Macaparana, geometry is not a series of rigid norms but a component of our everyday lives found both in popular art and in the art of the past when he analyzes the use that indigenous cultures made of it. All of this without forgetting the importance he grants music and the meaning it has in connection to his work. Macaparana describes himself as a “frustrated musician” and says that, albeit he is unable to explain why “everything is music.” The harmony of materials and forms in his work is intertwined with the priority he acknowledges for music in his way of making art. 

Macaparana’s proposal has the ability to explore the possibilities of experimentation with forms and materials, focused on an innovative language capable of infusing geometric construction with a unique rhythm.

IVONNE PINI