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