Danilo Di Prete was an Italian immigrant to Brazil and a self-taught figurative artist and publicist who joined Abstractionism and pioneered kinetic art in Brazil during the post-World War II period. Di Prete was attentive to international artistic movements, studied Cubism and abstraction, and was one of the pioneers of kinetic art. In the mid-1970s, he adopted a “metapsychic” figurative style, which he associated with cosmic voyages through an individual’s interior. The painting Untitled (1954) is representative of Di Prete’s first abstraction. The composition provokes a dispute between the darker, wavy section at its base and the yellowish tones in the upper part of the painting, with three hovering circles. Three other rectangular elements stand out, in addition to the small geometric shapes dispersed among different colour fields. The horizontal format, associated with landscapes, suggests a distant and blurred aerial view. This painting announces Di Prete’s enduring interest in new technology leading to his 1960s Paisagem Cósmica (Cosmic landscape) series, where he explores the impact of outer space voyages on art and life.
—Luiza Interlenghi
