ALFREDO SPAMPINATO

The observation of natural phenomena lies at the heart of Spampinato’s painting. Heavy skies, winds, rain, storms, lagoons, and expansive horizons are built through brushstrokes that animate the surface and register the shifting conditions of the landscape. His paintings possess a distinctive texture, formed through successive layers of paint and, at times, the addition of clay. Many were executed on hardboard panels that the artist himself purchased, cut, sanded, and prepared. The resulting surfaces are dense and almost topographical, with matter, light, and gesture participating directly in the construction of the image. Ranch houses, trees, horses, and other elements are reduced to essential forms.

Born in Gravina, Italy, Spampinato moved to Argentina as a child and studied with Pedro Domínguez Neira and Enrique Policastro. In the mid-1950s, he settled in José C. Paz, where he would live for the rest of his life, and became associated with Grupo Mayo, a collective of postwar figurative artists. Although frequently linked to Argentine naïve painting, Spampinato preferred to describe his work as a form of “poetic realism.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he participated in exhibitions and salons in Argentina and abroad, including Primitivos actuales de América (Madrid, 1967) and Arte Naif (Museo Emilio Caraffa, Córdoba, 1968), as well as solo exhibitions at the Museo Rosa Galisteo Rodríguez, Galería Witcomb, Galería Rubbers, and Galería Casa de Catalunya.

In the decades that followed, José C. Paz, where Spampinato lived and worked, underwent an intense process of urban expansion. His paintings do not document that transformation directly, but they preserve images of a landscape that no longer exists in the same form. In this sense, they act as vessels for an experience of place that remains accessible in the present, preserving the memory of a landscape profoundly transformed over time.

By presenting Spampinato’s work in Brazil for the first time, Gomide&Co expands its research into 20th-century Argentine painting and brings renewed attention to a trajectory shaped, over more than five decades, by a sustained observation of the Pampas landscape.