Who Was Antonio Bandeira, the Brazilian Abstract Painter
The art of Antônio Bandeira, a French Tachisme.
Antônio Bandeira.
Born May 26, 1922.
Antonio Bandeira (Brazil 1922 — France 1967).
He was born in Fortaleza, Ce — Brazil.
The Fortaleza-born painter Antonio Bandeira began his career as a figurative artist. He lived most of his productive time on the outskirts of Paris.
"The dirt of Paris was the most important thing in my painting."- Antonio Bandeira.
Title: Blue Streets 1955.
Oil on canvas, 26 x 22 in.
Painted in 1955 while in London, Blue Streets was part of the artist’s exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery held that same year.
Painted against a rich sky blue background with zigzag accents of black, white, red, and yellow the effects fill the composition with a kaleidoscopic effect.
The urban streets are full of energy rendered from above as a rhythmic pattern of interlacing lines and painterly marks and resulting in an abstract register of objective reality.
“The only thing I can say is that I keep on painting to stay alive, and since I love life intensely, and I want to stay alive, I keep on painting.”- Antonio Bandeira.
The postwar era marked the internationalization of abstraction as a global art movement.
And in Brazil artists were between a decidedly rigorous or geometric aesthetic to those that adopted a more intuitive approach by exploring aspects of abstract expressionism.
