A True Modernist

Who could be a better disseminator of Brazilian art in Europe and now in India than Artur Luis Piza. After settling in Paris since 1951, this painter-engraver has carved out his own refined singular language. Piza has explored engraving with beauty and elegance along with a post-surrealist figuration. Abandoning the post-surrealist figuration for a more abstract language, Piza began a journey in his art practice where lyricism and poetics are engaged in an intense dialogue.

In order to enter into Piza’s world, a dip into the beginnings of engraving becomes essential. The well-known art form of engraving is the age old practice of incising a design onto a hard, flat surface, the result of it being displayed in a decorative object in itself. Decoration is undeniably an ancient art form that is reflected in its inscriptions and antiquities. The magnitude of such embellishment indicated that they were not simply created with the sole purpose of adornment, but rather inspired by their vitality and intimate longing to articulate deep rhythms of life in a perceptible way. The ancient art of engraving was evident since the 1st Millennium BC, seen in the form of shallow groves in jewellery items. Coming to the early European Middle Ages, this art form was used to decorate and inscribe metal works, giving in to different line types. Engraving soon lost ground to etching, which was a much feasible technique for the artists to learn.

A highly universal language, Piza developed his own method using thick copper plates into which he carves and gouges shapes and lines intensely into the surface, a technique that is integrated - representing a unique amalgamation of engraving and etching. As quoted by him “To engrave, for me, it is to tear, cut, tear off a surface which resists.” He goes one step further when he says ‘my obsession lies with arranging and dis-arranging.’ In this particular exhibition, Piza uses wires in a favourable field for arranging his forms, in varying depths and positions, constructing and deconstructing them in a given space, as if searching for something hidden. An art form that is not visible in the Indian Contemporary Art, Piza’s works are evolved and highly conceptual

Often Piza uses a goldsmith’s hammer to sculpt low reliefs which when printed on paper become high reliefs. He transforms the traditional method of engraving on metal and transmutes them on paper to meet the needs of his own language of poetics, yet never compromising on the traditional techniques of engraving itself. These art works embrace a change, that go along with the thinkers who rebelled against the “traditional” forms of art. A true modernist.

~ Paul De Man

From the patient engraving of geometry, in Piza’s works to the bold journey of Regina with her decoupage of the space is like implementing with the two main tools like the moon, with the playing of light and dark, as the two artists create new spaces within the historical or even the most trivial spaces.