Luiz Zerbini: Ruminated Landscapes
Luiz Zerbini’s solo exhibition Ruminated Landscapes is a retrospective exploring Zerbini’s diverse practice across the past three decades. Curated by Clarissa Diniz, it brings together new and historical works, emphasising the artist’s examination of the relationship between art and ecology.
Across his career, Zerbini has developed a complex visual vocabulary at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. Juxtaposing organic and geometric forms, his paintings explore the relationship between colour, light and movement. The grid — a formal leitmotif closely associated with modernism — heavily features in the artist’s recent paintings, a subtle nod to the mosaic pavements and façades of Brazilian tower blocks. Using it as a compositional structuring device, numerous works show geometric forms juxtaposed with lush, tropical flora.
A cacophony of colour, these works convey the immersive and seductive quality of Brazil’s natural environment. Flooding the viewer’s perception, Zerbini tries to provide the impression of “being in the painting as you could be in a forest.” Palm fronds, coiled ferns and roughly textured tree trunks often encroach upon the works’ gridded structure. These forms merge with areas of abstract mark-making, demonstrating how the artist appropriates patterns found in nature and incorporates them into his own vernacular. The rhythmic structure of Zerbini’s paintings captures the movement of trees swaying in the breeze or bodies of cascading water, lending his works a striking dynamism.
