Alceu Ribeiro

As the end of the year arrives, we would like to close the season with an exhibition dedicated to one of the leading exponents of the Torres-Garcia Workshop. It’s Alceu Ribeiro, whom we met in 1997 and kept collaborating with him until his death in 2013.

Ribeiro met Torres-García in 1939 and will stay by his side until 1949, date of the passing of his death, and from then on, he decides to focus on teaching at “el Molino”, his own workshop, and at the University. The admiration for his master will always be great, but over the years he would achieve what he called “my small particularities”. As he liked to put it: “I think every day I look more like myself”.

On this occasion, and after our last exhibition dedicated to his work in 2014, we have managed to gather a selection of pieces that have remained mostly unseen. The show, that will feature his paintings as well as his personal wood collages, includes works from the 1975 – 2013 period. In his work, you can appreciate the internalization of constructivism as something that becomes natural.

Alceu didn’t need to calculate or size spaces to achieve equilibrium in his work; it arises spontaneously, proving that the constructivist theories learnt in his youth have been fully assimilated, incorporated to his own person like a second skin. It was intrinsic to his way of being and to his way of painting, something inescapable. As you will see through the show, in interiors as well as landscapes and still lifes, his structural approach remains the same. The theme is the least important, because, as he said, “a painting is always abstract. Later, it will be figurative or not”. The result is always a constructivist work, where rhythm and structure mark the composition, they organize it. It’s those elements that achieve that a surface acquires transcendence.