SÉRGIO SISTER

Mostly known as an abstract painter and placed among the most rigorous and subtle artists in Brazil today, Sérgio Sister developed along the past decades a work that is characterised by its serial unfolding and featuring masterfully achieved colour-field structures that according to Oramas, ‘can arguably be considered among the most significant examples of late-modern monochromatic painting in Latin America.’

The production in the emprisonnement context was a mean of resistance, a way of recovering his own identity and finding a spiritual place to help him through such a dark period. In the curator’s words, works produced in this conditions are ‘a struggle for life and the grounding axes for hope: a form of survivor’.

Sergio Sister’s drawings and paintings from the 1960’s share a common language at that time: one determined by the broad internationalisation of American Pop Art. In Brazil, the pop movement reflected the tensions triggered by the imposition of its military regime and like other artists of his generation, Sister intuitively utilised pop art’s irony and aggressiveness as an outlet for social and political issues.

A careful look at these early drawings and paintings surprisingly reveals that their compositional structures echo-as anticipations-the essential, basic framing configurations of Sister’s mature and recent work, marked by a consistent production of abstract painting that began around the end of the 1980’s, with a a landmark series of dark, almost black, monochromes. In these and later works, the surfaces of the canvases are defined by a subtle variation of textural brushstrokes, resulting in the production of richly ‘tonal’ surfaces that is a signature in his production until today.