São Paulo – Azor Feres painted landscapes, portraits, trips and scenes of everyday life. He did not specialize in a specific matter, only showing what he saw or felt. It was common, for example, to see him driving along Fernão Dias Highway, with no specific destination in mind. If, on his trip, he saw a scene that attracted him, he stopped, took out his easel, paints, brushes, and put what he saw on canvas. That is how he produced many of the 40 pictures that are to be shown at Mount Lebanon Club, in São Paulo, to celebrate the 100 years of his birth, in 1911. The painter died in 2005. The exhibition should go from November 24th to December 4th.
Feres was the seventh of 12 children of the Lebanese Yousseff and Helena. He started painting at age ten, at a school in Amparo, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, where he was born. His talent, however, was never appreciated by his father, who threw out his paints and brushes. Feres did not give up and always painted, sometimes hiding within his father’s own shop.
He got into medical school and took the course up to the fourth year. After his father’s death, he dropped out of the course and completed a different course: Law. In the 1940s, Feres bought a weaver from a client and kept it until 1960. He would also own a sock factory until his wife, Walderez, pushed him to invest in his career as a painter.
"His first collective exhibition took place in 1974. The first individual one, in 1978. He had been painting since the 1920s. Before that, he had sold very little, until my mother pushed him to become a professional painter, participating in auctions, putting him in the ‘circuit’,” recalls the third of the painter’s four children, Carim José Feres. After entering the "circuit", Feres liked exhibiting and had as much as three exhibitions a year.
Pictures belonging to the family will be shown alongside others from private collections, on loan for the exhibition. Apart from canvases, visitors participating in the opening will see a 2005 interview with Feres, also showing scenes from his honeymoon, in the Arab world, in 1962.
In the first exhibition, the pictures will be organized by decade, from the 1920s, when Feres did his first work, to the latest. According to Carim, his father only stopped painting in 1988, when Walderez died. "He was depressed and spent a couple of years without painting,” he explained. When he returned to work, Feres no longer drove down highways in São Paulo, with no destination in mind, and he no longer went on global adventures. But, anyway, he continued painting scenes worldwide.
"He always went around with a note pad and a crayon. When he saw a scene that he liked, he sketched it in this block and then transferred it to a larger picture. He stored the scene in his memory,” said Carim. That was how he painted pictures of Venice. That was also how he painted what he called "Arab scenes", images of tents, camels and desert people.
An appreciator of painters of the XIX Century, like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, Feres used to apply to his canvases the same techniques as those developed by the masters of impressionism: short and fast strokes, not very clear pictures showing the exact effect of waves in the sea, the wind on trees or even on the sands of the desert.
Apart from brushes, Feres also used another tool to pant: a spatula. "He used a painter’s spatula, special, which demanded force and technique. He even felt pain in his hands. The impressionists used this technique in part of their painting, but not for the entire canvas, as he got to do,” said Carim.
Service
The canvases of Azor Feres will be shown at Mount Lebanon Athletic Club, at Avenida República do Líbano, 2,267, Ibirapuera. From November 24th to December 4th, from 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm. The opening of the exhibition will be at 8:30 pm, on the 24th. Tel.: 5088-7070. Admittance is free.
*Translated by Mark Ament
