MASP

Born into a rural working-class family on the Amalfi Coast, a region he frequently depicted, Antônio Ferrigno often touched on social issues in his work, portraying views from the city of Naples, where he studied painting. Seeking a new direction for his painting — the exotic, the vibrant colors of tropical landscapes — in 1893 he traveled to Brazil, where he hoped to find commission opportunities on the then-expanding Brazilian art market. At the time, as São Paulo became wealthier, its art market intensified; the city was even home to a group of Italian artists. During the twelve years he spent in São Paulo, from 1893 to 1905, Ferrigno produced an important Paulista (referring to the state of São Paulo) iconography, portraying the state’s countryside and its coast, in addition to commissions from wealthy landowners promoting their export products, as well as everyday scenes of ordinary people’s lives. Uniting observation and imagination, Ferrigno usually worked from studies made on-site, later finalizing the work at his studio with fictionalized additions. He often painted several versions of the same landscapes, signing but not dating some works, perhaps revelatory of his production process and desire to circulate this work. In the city of São Paulo, Ferrigno mostly depicted scenes from the east of what was then downtown (where the Parque Dom Pedro [Dom Pedro Park] is today). Rua 25 de março, SP [March 25th Street, SP] (circa 1894) presents a view of this key commercial thoroughfare, in which we also see the São Bento Monastery, peddlers on the sidewalk of the Municipal Market and a carriage making its way through the muddy street, in addition to washerwomen – subjects he had depicted during an earlier phase, back in Italy – on the banks of the Tamanduateí River. In his work, we are able to observe how geography and topography influenced the city’s industrialization. Ladeira Porto Geral, SP [Porto Geral Hill, SP] (circa 1894) depicts another view of the monastery. Of particular note is the complexity with which Ferrigno painted the water and its optical effects, portraying the washerwomen, the scene’s subjects, through the reflection of their clothes and bodies mirrored in the water. In Rio Tamanduateí, São Paulo, SP [Tamanduateí River, São Paulo, SP] (1894), Ferrigno depicted houses along the Tamanduateí River, where staircases provided residents with direct access to their boats, atop the river. Ferrigno painted São Paulo’s landscape from the perspective of its rivers, along which the city was founded, emphasizing their role in transportation and everyday chores such as laundry. His was a city that held a closer relationship to nature than it does today, surrounded by mountains, lush with vegetation and crisscrossed by bridges linking it to what at the time was its rural area. Though they cannot be considered direct records of the time, Ferrigno’s paintings offer glimpses into fundamental aspects of the city’s landscape and customs in the early twentieth century. Ferrigno also documented the city’s colonial-style architecture, which came to be quickly demolished over the following decades. He also registered the city’s precarious sidewalks and streets, and the floods that at the time already interrupted traffic. In this scene, he also portrayed the everyday interaction between working-class people and horse-drawn carriages.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018

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