Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato was born in 1900 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s first planned city. While nature has often offered Lorenzato formal inspiration that connects him with a lineage of European painters, from Giotto to Matisse, in his oeuvre it is often linked to larger social contexts. The frontal composition of Araucárias (1973) shows a rigidly arranged line of trees that cast their nearly abstract shadows along a rough, earthy path on the bottom portion of the painting. The coniferous evergreens represented are of an indigenous species from Southern Brazil, widely used in the construction of settlers’ houses during the country’s European immigration boom in the late nineteenth century. These trees, featured in early twentieth-century Brazilian craft iconography, were sought after by the elite as symbols connecting them with European taste. If Lorenzato’s use of this motif is evocative of immigration and diaspora histories, it is also part of a larger body of work in which he represents other Brazilian plants of historical importance.
—Rodrigo Moura
