“Untitled”

Rodrigo Andrade has been painting, engraving and working as a graphic artist since the 1980s. He has won several awards and has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including the 23rd and 29th editions of the São Paulo Biennial, the 6th Inter-American Biennial (Colombia), and the 2nd Havana Biennial (Cuba), among others. His work is part of important public collections, such as those of the Brasília Museum of Art, the Itaú Cultural Institute, the Pampulha Art Museum, the MAM – São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, and other private collections.

During his formative years, he attended Sérgio Fingermann's studio and studied in France and Scotland. He began to produce his work in the 1980s, when he joined the Casa 7 group, alongside Carlito Carvalhosa, Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos and Paulo Monteiro. Also influenced by German neo-expressionism, Rodrigo's early paintings are presented in large formats, with expressive brushstrokes and strong colors. Varying between figurative and abstract phases until the mid-1990s, his work underwent significant changes from 1999 onwards, when he began to create works in which thick masses of oil paint, in simple geometric shapes, are applied to the canvas in pairs or quartets. His painting, then, will begin to establish dialogues with the places where it is inserted, as in " Lanches Alvorada" , where the paint plates are applied directly to the walls of a bar in downtown São Paulo, in 2001, or " Paredes da Caixa" , from 2006, and, also, " Óleo sobre", presented at the Pinacoteca, in 2010.

According to curator Thaisa Palhares, “from the beginning, Rodrigo Andrade does not question the individual power of his masses of color. (…) Libido, the driving force behind all action, is embodied in these geometric shapes, waiting for a trigger. Contact between them and their surroundings will activate this energy. The result is a curious process of singularization that occurs through exchange and contamination. (…). By stretching the boundaries of his painting, Rodrigo Andrade takes a risk. Everything could result in a pure decorative effect if one did not believe in the possibility of differentiation.”

Recently, another major change has occurred in his work, which returns to figuration in the series " Matéria noite" (Night Matter) , presented at the 29th São Paulo Biennial, where the artist paints photographic images, but still applying very thick layers of paint on canvases that lie between the illusion of the photographic image and the concrete presence of the paint surface.