Arpa 2023

The decision to present a booth with a solo show of works by Fernando Zarif was made with two aims: to pay merited homage to this artist, and to let the public know more about his multidisciplinary production, which greatly impacted the São Paulo art scene in the 1980s and ’90s. Curated by Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, who has been studying Fernando Zarif’s legacy since 2018, the selection presents a representative set of never-before-shown works, emphasizing the singularity of his pictorial production in the context of the so-called “return to painting” in Brazilian art in the 1980s. It also features tridimensional and photographic experiments, especially self-portraits, which allowed Zarif to produce figurative works in keeping with his theatricalized, rebellious lyricism and expressivity. A further aim is to show the independence and virtuosity that allowed the artist to intercross the dominant trends of his time – which were couched in formalist thinking and in the heroic character of abstract North American expressionism, cultivating a philosophical and poetic “Orientalism” informed by the tradition of surrealist automatism and by a musical conception of art history.