As the son of Italian migrants of humble origin, Pancetti started to paint while also working as a sailor. Not by chance, a significant part of his work, and the one for which he is most known, consists of paintings of coastal landscapes. He made around 65 self-portraits, especially during his two final decades of living. Usually, he was represented in profile, with an angled face and an intense, questioning gaze. He also used to associate his own figure to specific crafts or social roles: admiral, sailor, striker, family man, or a workman, as in Self-portrait with maul. With a serious complexion and candid look, a seasoned man firmly and proudly wields this work tool over his shoulder. In addition to establishing a reference to the artist’s biography—he who worked as a mechanic, carpenter, and wall painter before joining the Brazilian Marine Corps, and whose father was a mason and construction foreman —, the painting also establishes a bond between artistic making and manual workmanship. Such parallel comes close to the understanding of the piece of art as work, just like Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) used to defend, so as to desacralize and decolonize the conventional hierarchies between the scholarly European tradition and popular, self-taught productions. Since it is displayed in the museum’s crystal glass easels, one can also observe the back of this self-portrait, in which it is possible to see how Pancetti used to prefer canvases easy to carry and oftentimes used its back as a journal, where he took notes of personal reflections or even painted different compositions, as is the case in this strange still life with two dolls.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
