Mario Rubinski

Art and artists from Paraná play an important role in both the collection and the exhibition calendar at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum. The staging of this great solo exhibition by Mario Rubinski, one of our exponents, confirms this premise.

Here, more than a hundred of the artist's works and studies are presented. These are paintings and drawings that cover six decades of production, from the end of 1950 to 2021, in a historic exhibition. 

Rubinski trained at the Paraná School of Fine Arts and experienced the effervescence of the Paraná Public Library as the main cultural center in Curitiba. He exhibited and won awards in salons, interacted with great artists, and tirelessly taught art throughout his life.

His unmistakable work brings together the elements of the landscape through geometricization and symbolic abstraction. They are compositions of simplified forms or figures that speak to us about the nature inhabited by man, about our being in the world, evoking a certain silence and reflection. In scenes depicted on canvas, the spectator finds space to search for memories or project expectations.

In this way, Rubinski's expressive body of work, gathered here, fulfills the noblest function of art, that of raising awareness. At the same time, the Museum that houses it offers the public an experience capable of stretching and transforming the gaze.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika 
Chief Executive Officer Oscar Niemeyer Museum

The magnetized space (fragments about Rubinski)

 “For me, painting doesn't tell a story.”
Mario Rubinski

It is not precisely that context in which painting relies on a narrative when the word is more addicted and virtualized, or on a supposed report/correlated, the world envisioned by the essentialist and spiritual work of Mário Rubinski. His universe, practically monotonous, ruled by the rigor of austere and genuine visual research for decades on the same themes, shapes, colors, and concerns – as happens with referenced poetics, such as Morandi or Volpi, both self-centered and also centripetal –, is radially centered and bifurcates into visual paths that are always close, contiguous, brothers. As if it were turning on itself, on the same steps. And, therefore, without any information, news, or subaltern data that could be distracting. Rubinski, from the beginning, is more a painter of the zone than of the territory, of a space magnetized by the triad color/space/composition in which his entire raison d'être is enhanced, as well as his religare (the sense of its connections, both between its tangible, aesthetic, and intangible, semantic elements). An imagery status profiled in constructive modernity, of evident geometry, but whose imagination is beyond appearances, since, as the artist says, “I don't make a house that looks like a house”, serving a reason (symbol) multiplied in his work so veiled in its transparency.  

The contemplated reality – and there is an immediacy of contemplation required in this painting, of static present, which vibrates timelessly, parallel to its self-absorbed enjoyment –, its physiognomy arranged so economically, involves playing with the evident symbols used as presences that are repeated: besides the house, the wall – with its distant affinities with Volpian façades –, the trees, the streets, the creeks, the squares, the skies, the paths that show a planar and vertical aesthetic definition, a pictorial lyric, in the arrangement of the elements chosen as signs, parts in metamorphic construction, which pictograms inserted in a gravitational force. A transparent atmosphere seems to float in front of our eyes. Hide its almost submerged light, changing as we look. And, in a dense planar condition, with a wealth of plans and lines, in a synthetic structure in which compositions are elaborated whose aura refers to an indefinite, abstract time, of a certain unreality, despite the figurative recognition – perhaps because everything is illuminated at the limits of abstraction –, on a frontier that reduces the recognizable to minimal, synthesized extremes: the result of an abbreviated reality, stripped down to its exact point of fiction. Who doubts the desire to appropriate this gaze as part of primitive or enlightened magic?   

His work will be made on the margins of currents, groups, and aesthetics to be shared. Up until now, the statements in his painting have sought a broader cosmology, which has been limited to its origin and starting point. Incidentally, the imagineria (the imaginary) ebbs and flows, structuring a frame, a composition, a scene, which always seems to belong more to a topology than to a chronology. In short, to a local village that wants to be universal, since, lacking the temporal dimension, the weight of time is winged, absent (no date). The coordinates of the canvases are engraved in this poetics: “Everything is between liquefaction (magma) and volatility (nebula). (3) Between an architecture or a landscape that appears to almost disappear or float – a high paradox, apparently appeased. 

It would then seem as if the artist turned on a light inside the painting to veil the painted reality – like a religious gesture by Rubinski. An offering. A declaration at the same time as a confession, as it is important to talk about the lighting in his painting, about the importance of light, how it changes with the position, always on the side of the shadow – shadow in reverse –, never a frontal light. 

In the vibrating effect of this painting, the elements (the emblematic ones: the house, the wall, the tree, a whole trinity) are objects, as well as the sky, the road, the street, given the compositional function, and reach the status of archetypes in a highly elevated way. The evoked atmosphere – that aerial condition so omnipresent and visible that it permeates the motifs represented – is based on the accuracy of plans and contours, of an architectural design. At this point, the three-dimensional illusion on the plane does not exist (5), the visual formulation of its elements, arranged with attenuated colors, only increases the flatness, the absence of depth, and the imbricated value of the colors and their relationships. How modernism and later avant-gardes made painting and its development autonomous.    

And that is the other (cultural) reason, along with aesthetics (a sui generis post-constructivism), why Rubinski's work is interesting today. Because it is impossible to see it outside the world in crisis in which we live, despite the obtuse and pathetic denialism in the circle of archaic interpretations. There is a voice speaking in this painting that is not merely ecological, but of another greater conscience - hence also the magnetized space, which means, in connection, in religatio, that is, closer and, paradoxically, greater, based on the consciousness of a common destiny. The result is not idyllic (or bucolic, as happens with the bunch of the naïf) – and that would be the big difference between naivety and purity of vision – nor is it positivist (since there is no historicist nor merely physical rule, determined by these values; there is an instigating deconstruction in all, paintings, drawings, gouaches: look, poetics).  

Adolfo Montejo Navas
Curator

Mario Beckmann Rubinski was born in 1933, in Curitiba, where he lived and worked until he died in 2021.

He graduated in Library Science (UFPR, 1955) and Painting (1958, EMBAP), with a specialization course in Drawing Didactics (1959, PUC). 

Visual artist, painter, designer, and illustrator – with an important role in teaching, Rubinski was a drawing teacher for educators at the Casa Alfredo Andersen Museum in the 1970s. He taught art and geometric drawing in several private and public schools and worked from 1956 to 1985 at the Public Library of Paraná, where he was head of the Fine Arts section. 

His extensive resume covers six decades of production. Several solo exhibitions stand out, including Cocaco Gallery (1963); Paraná Plastic Arts Circle (1964); Senior Club (1967); Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná (1982); Special Room - 43rd Paraná Salon (1986); Painting by Mário Rubinski, Banestado Gallery (1991); Alfredo Andersen Museum (1993); Rubinski - From Silence, Art Museum of the Federal University of Paraná (2006); Solar do Rosário Gallery with the publication of a book Mario Rubinski (2007); The Reason for Landscape II, 14th International Curitiba Biennial, Casa Alfredo Andersen Museum (2019), in Curitiba. 

Among numerous group exhibitions, there are: “Brasil Plástica 72”, São Paulo Biennial Foundation (1972); “Panorama of Art in Paraná”, BADEP (1976), “Paraná Artists”, Álvares Penteado Foundation (1984); “Tradition/Contradiction”, Paraná Museum of Contemporary Art (1986); “Paraná Art - Renovation Movement”, Caixa Cultural de Curitiba (1999), “Lugar”, UFPR Art Museum (2005); and “PR BR - Production of the Symbolic Image of Paraná in Brazilian Visual Culture”, Oscar Niemeyer Museum (2012). He received a tribute in the “Light and Matter” exhibition at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (2018). 

In the context of events and salons, he was the artist with the greatest participation, having great prominence with a special room and twenty awards at the Paraná Art Salon, Spring Fine Arts Salon, and Brazilian Drawing Exhibition, among others.

His works are part of important public and private collections.

Mario Rubinski considered art a personal craft and handicrafts a means of honest expression, freed from utilitarian, immediate commitments. Like many modern artists, Rubinski reiterated the brushed gestures, making his decisions visible as poetic. This presence of doing ensures the dedicated aspect of his output. However, his gestures in the painting do not only generate a trace of spontaneous subjectivity. Instead, for Rubinski, art was a complex thing: a cerebral doing, but a problematic one, because it was as much about feeling as it was about understanding. Thus, creation in painting was converted into the voluntary and incessant reworking of compositions ordered by spontaneous drawing, the main substance of his imagination.

A methodical experimenter, the artist entered painting with an idea scratched in chalk and found in the materials, the paint, and the support, both limitations and possibilities. His process involved conscious comings and goings as he painted and scratched the surface of the plane over and over again. This behavior by Rubinski reflects something of the limits of ideation, but his works do not stop at this impasse, as they seem to portray the search for a distinct unit. 

He was looking for a way out of painting through a poetics of the sensitive: we can feel in his compositions an atmosphere of a world in which things from culture and nature are in harmony. That sensibility, which was

Bruno Marcelino
August 2023