BRÊTAS Marcos, painting

Marcos Brêtas has never aspired to being a contemporary painter. Belonging to a generation of artists that do not see painting as a vanguard activity, he nonetheless became a painter. 


Since studying at Escola de Artes Visuais de Parque Lage in the early 1980s, he has kept to this domain and become increasingly committed to his discipline, which is viscerally attached to the expressive nature of his works. 


Swimming against the tide at a time when beauty is held in mistrust, in his work there is a great respect for the modernist pictorial tradition. Unswayed by contemporary artistic mores, which hold that painting should be analytic and distances, Marcos Brêtas gives primacy to introspection and intimacy. He tirelessly explores the ongoing legacy and issue of modern painting, both European and Brazilian. 


Like Eugène Leroy, between the intransigeance of Lucien Freud and the phantasmal universes of Iberê Camargo, Brêtas forges a singular path that reveals vast, obscure, somber inner landscapes that are intensely poetic and of rare expressive power. 


« Everything is baroque: thermosphere, the texture, the space » the artist has declared. Yet it is silence that first strikes us, invading the canvases, slowly creeping in. Reminiscences of his Brazilian culture or an attempt to justify creations that reveal more than intuitive craft? « There aren’t any sketches; I paint straight onto the canvases. My work isn’t planned »


Clémence Houdard


Biography

Marcos Brêtas was born in 1959 in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1979, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro before attending the Parque Lage School of Visual Art until 1991, still in Rio de Janeiro. 

Marcos Brêtas has been living and working in France for about twenty years. 

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Exhibitions

2021  Enfances, Galerie Capazza, Nançay

2015  Personal exhibition, Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2012  Open doors, Ateliers du Ventre de la Baleine, Pantin, France

2011  Open doors, Ateliers du Ventre de la Baleine, Pantin, France

2009  Open doors, Ateliers du Ventre de la Baleine, Pantin, France
Open doors, Ateliers des Frigos, Paris, France

2008  Open doors, Ateliers des Frigos, Paris, France

2007  Open doors, Ateliers des Frigos, Paris, France 

2001  Open doors, Ateliers des Frigos, Paris, France

1998  Índice, Museu da Republica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1994  Open doors, Ateliers de la Bastille, Paris, France

1993  Gravidade e Aparência, Museu Municipal de Arte, Curitiba, Brazil
Fundação Cultural de Curitiba, Brazil

1992  Gravidade e Aparência, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
9X6, Galeria Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1989  Exposition collective, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Salvador
Collective exhibition, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1987  5° Salão de Arte Contemporanêa de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

1986  39° Salão de Art de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

1984  37° Salão de Art de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

1983  40° Salão de Art do Paraná, Museu Arte Contemporanêa, Curitiba, Brazil

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