Francisco Rebolo worked as a house painter and played soccer, including for the famed São Paulo team, Corinthians, for whom he also designed the club crest. Born into a working-class family, he portrayed their daily lives and those of rural laborers; but he also studied art history and dialogued with other immigrant painters in São Paulo. Such contact later gave rise to the Saint Helen Group in the 1930s, whose members included Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), Aldo Bonadei (1906–1974) and Clóvis Graciano (1907–1988). Rebolo’s paintings reveal a chromatic softness—he was described as the “master of the half-shade”—through synthetic, geometrized and flat compositions. His works present clouded perspectives, depths and planes, as seen in Casario com paisagem [Row of Houses with Landscape] (1958), in which Rebolo also portrayed the aged, rustic aspect of these houses. The canvas is divided; one side features a representation of the city and its groups of buildings, while the other presents the natural environment of fields and trees, to the front of mountains in the farthest picture plane. The rectangular shape of the cluster of houses contrasts with the oval canopy of cypress trees; the houses almost swallow one of them. Moreover, the blending and build up of shapes and tones can be seen in how the houses are painted, but not in the field, which is represented more freely and spaciously. In 1954, Rebolo won a trip abroad, which led him to live in Italy between 1955 and 1957. Casario com paisagem is probably a work from this European phase, influenced by Sicilian landscapes; it was finished after Rebolo returned to Brazil. During this time, he produced works that largely focused on the geometric rigor of formal structuring, influenced by the typical colors of Italian architecture with its ochers, browns and reds.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018

---