“Little bricks”

Sérgio Sister produces paintings, drawings and pictorial volumes. He participated in the 9th and 25th editions of the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (1967, 2002). Throughout his career he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2012. His work is in the collections of the Centro Cultural São Paulo, the Itaú Collection, the Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, MAM - Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Although he began painting in the sixties, Sérgio Sister began his career as an artist in the eighties. Corresponding to the trend of that time of a return to painting, which had been left aside by the conceptual artists of the seventies, Sister was influenced by the Brazilian constructivist tradition. When he abandoned figurative art, covering a canvas with thick layers of black paint, the artist began the investigation that continues throughout his work to this day.

Through expressive brushstrokes and visible gestures, we can see in his paintings from the 1980s and 1990s how external light influences the perception of color, enabling exchanges between the environment and the painting. The paints used by the artist are sometimes combined with metallic materials such as mica or aluminum, which further reinforce the issues related to depth, reflection and fields of light as opposed to shadow.

In the 1990s, his works expanded into the three-dimensional field, when the artist created the first slats and, years later, the first "Pontaletes". In these reliefs, long wooden slats in different colors are supported on the wall and balanced vertically and horizontally to form right angles. In line with this work, the artist also developed the "Ripas" series, which in a more synthetic way aligns the same searches: they are diptychs or triptychs made with slats, this time suspended on the wall. Later, Sister developed the Caixas series, based on fruit crates: in these works the relationships between colors, light, shadow and depth become even clearer.

Regarding multiples, Sérgio Sister says that “objectively, multiples are a way of expanding access to works of art. Since they are not a single object, but rather multiplied, their price is lower. In theory, multiplication is seen as a modern trend towards demystifying the aura of the single object, which would give it an exceptional value due to this quality. Multiplication would be the democratization of the art object.” And the artist also adds about the work he created for Carbono: “These little bricks are part of the same production universe as all my other volumes. They came in the process of constructing the painting in space, initially (in the 1990s) on bricks from Bahia, later replaced by rectangles of wood and metal. They combine and project colors into the common space, thus seeking to give the painting another type of experience.”