Luiz Zerbini: Fire at Stephen Friedman Gallery – Love songs in praise of the rainforest

Jo Manby

Jo Many reviews ‘Luiz Zerbini: Fire’ at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. The exhibition can be accessed online here and can be visited at the gallery from 13 April to 15 May.

A virtual tour of ‘Luiz Zerbini: Fire’ at the Stephen Friedman Gallery reveals vistas onto luscious urban forests. The artist’s ravishing paintings celebrate the cycles and systems of nature in the built environment and are heavily influenced by the incorporation of wilderness at the heart of Brazilian cities and the coloured grids of their tower blocks and mosaics.

The dazzling brilliance of colourful interlocking forms of painted plants and geometrics in the main works, however, belie the subtle message of the four monotypes at the far end of the gallery, which quietly whisper of a deeper connection with nature. There’s a story behind the monotypes, I discovered. But first, I wanted to find out more about the artist and his inspiration.

Zerbini was born in Sao Paulo in 1959 and moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1982. He is a graduate of the Fine Art School of Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) and participated in the landmark exhibition of 1984, ‘Como vai você, Geração 80?’ (‘How Are You Doing, 80s Generation?’). His early work tended to be large-scale, figurative and highly colourful, at times including classical motifs, but also a hint of the grids and checks of his later work. 

Zerbini first started to incorporate real plants as components of installations in his exhibitions in 2008, when he was invited to make work as the lead artist in an exhibition named after a new publication, The Cabinet of Curiosities of Domenico Vandelli (an 18th century Italian naturalist and explorer). Zerbini undertook a four-month residency at the Botanical Gardens of Rio de Janeiro, and the resulting touring exhibition both began at, and inaugurated, the Garden’s new Environment Museum.

Vandelli, who mainly studied and worked in Portugal, undertook the planning of several artistic and scientific expeditions to Brazil for the King of Portugal, Dom Joao VI, from 1783. Two artists and a botanical gardener accompanied the expeditions’ lead naturalist, Vandelli’s student, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Hundreds of documents from the voyages are preserved in the Division of Manuscripts of the National Library Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, in the Alexandre Rodriguez Ferreira Collection, and Zerbini was able to examine this archive during his residency.

From the documents, Vandelli was able to construct an imaginarium of Braziliana without personally having set foot on Brazilian territory; rather, he observed the Portuguese colonial project from afar. The memories, illustrations and diaries of these journeys were published in Rio de Janeiro in 2008 as a boxed collection of eight books, also entitled The Cabinet of Curiosity of Domenico Vandelli.

Over his three decades-long career, Zerbini has developed a continuing fascination with the relationship between nature and humanity within Rio de Janeiro. In his 2018 exhibition, Intuitive Ratio, at the South London Gallery, large canvases sprawled with rubbish left after a night of celebration merging with figuratively depicted plants – cacti, palms, bamboo – and small creatures – rats, birds and snails. In his introductory presentation, he mentioned local children bringing him objects to include in his paintings, or of finding interesting items amongst the flotsam of daily life that drifts up the pavement to his studio door.

Most recently, he was involved in the 2019 group exhibition ‘Trees (Nous Les Arbres)’ at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. The show doubled as a protest against the sacrificing of the natural world to human exploitation, and a dethroning of the human being amid nature. Zerbini filled his designated area of the building with paintings, monoprints and an installation of trees and plants in the form of an herbarium.

‘Fire’ is his second show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. His intuitive, burgeoning paintings of urban Brazil aspire to imitate the sensory experience of the tropical environment. Clashing natural forms with the sobriety of a grid, he conjures forth the fire of the title. Art is political, like everything else, he says, still busy at work at a time when the pandemic rages and climate change ignites landscapes from Australia to Siberia.

He kindles painterly fire by conjoining hyperreal depictions of plants and trees with geometric patterns which often involve curvilinear shapes that establish a dynamic sense of movement. These are directly inspired by tiles and mosaics but also reflect the inherent geometries of nature on a micro and a macro level. In some, like the panoramic Happiness Beyond Paradise, an orthogonal grid is tempered with dynamic interlocking curves of colour and the flourishes and arabesques of palms, cycads and other tropical vegetation. In others, such as Diagrama de um tempo insano III, Zerbini has applied paint to rollers to mark the squared-up canvas with a harmonious array of loosely linear patterns reminiscent of textile design.

Stepping back from this vibrant dynamism and heightened colour are the more contemplative series of monotypes.

This extended body of work began in 2016, when Zerbini embarked on a week-long residency at Inhotim Botanical Gardens in Brumadinho in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 600k north of Rio de Janeiro. He was joined there by the Rio based printer, João Sanchez. Sanchez founded the print studio, Estudio Baren, in 2011, where he develops editions as an artist and editor in collaboration with other artists and with an emphasis on experimentation. 

Inhotim is an outdoor art gallery and botanical gardens occupying thousands of acres of land in Minas Gerais. The gardens and gallery were founded by former mining magnate Bernardo Paz and designed by his friend Roberto Burle Marx and are now home to over 500 works of art by leading international artists. Inhotim had also hosted the touring Vandelli exhibition back in 2009 that was the result of Zerbini’s previous botanical garden residency.

Zerbini and Sanchez travelled to Inhotim in a truck carrying a printing press that could accommodate 107 x 80cm sheets of paper. Together they spent time in the botanical gardens searching for large and beautiful examples of leaves and flowers, filling a cart with help from the gardeners and taking the harvest to a nearby warehouse to put the leaves through the press. Sanchez seems to have been an organising influence in his role of editor and co-artist, giving advice to Zerbini on what was possible and how to go about it. Although Zerbini had made prints before, this was the first time he had printed directly from leaves and flowers.

Zerbini appears to take a robust attitude towards the natural world as a resource to be utilised. He does not shy away from cutting up plants or uprooting them to transplant them to a gallery space. But perhaps this is a reinforcement of the idea of coexistence; the idea that nature can be used by humans as long as it is allowed to replenish itself. It is clear from the reverence with which he treats his subject matter in his work that he is someone who deplores the destruction of the rainforests and the devastation of climate change across the planet.

To create the monotypes on show at Stephen Friedman Gallery, Zerbini used plants which he grows in the garden of his studio in Rio de Janeiro to employ in his work. He works directly on an acrylic template, painting it with fluid oil paint and placing the leaf on the surface. He then passes the leaf through the printing press transferring its double onto the paper. 

In this way the leaf becomes the matrix. In printing, this refers to the object on which a design has been formed and which is then inked up and used to make a chromatic impression on a piece of paper to create a print. A wood block, metal plate or lithographic stone are examples of matrices.

He repeats the process with other shades of pigment and types of foliage within each work. Some areas of paper are left bare, others becoming complex and layered. The residue of paint and moisture from previous presses is left visible and details of veins, surface texture and delicate outlines emerge from the veils of subtle colour.

Zerbini first showed his monotypes at Fortes D’Aloia + Gabriel, Galpão in Sao Paulo in 2017. He said in a text originally published in the book Artenatureza: Inhotim espaço tempo (Artnature: Inhotim space time), published by Instituto Inhotim in 2016: ‘If it were for me, I would subject the whole world to the press’. In June this year, the Fondation Cartier will publish a 296-page volume, Botanica: Monotypes 2016-2020, which will collect together this body of Zerbini’s work.

Such a book is highly reminiscent of the historic tradition of botanical and zoological encyclopaedias, such as Species Plantarum, published in 1753, by the inventor of modern botanical and zoological taxonomy Carl Linnaeus. The kind of book that Vandelli and Ferreira would be familiar with as they tirelessly inventoried flora and fauna to quench a thirst for knowledge characteristic of their European contemporaries as they sought to dominate and colonise foreign territories.

However, while Zerbini’s monotypes are indisputably botanically correct, since to produce them he lays the actual leaf onto the pigment washed plate, their colour, arrangement, aesthetic and composition secure them firmly in the realm of the artist’s print. Also, Zerbini is native to Brazil, and his perspective on the natural world is one of far greater respect than that of the colonisers of old.

His paintings organically imitate the rhythm, proliferation and fecundity of the rainforest – leaves spreading across the canvas in unfurling streaks of paint as graffiti spills across a concrete façade or as the wilderness encroaches on a city. The monotypes reveal a calmer, more methodical approach. Each one embodies a reflection, tender as the lyrics of a love song to the natural world, in praise of its beauty and its combination of strength and fragility.