laudio Bravo was born in 1936 in Valparaiso, Chile. The second of seven children, he attended a Jesuit school in Santiago and briefly studied art in the studio of a local painter. Largely self-taught, Bravo showed an early talent for a precise and graceful Realism that helped him escape poverty and since 1961 he establish as a society portraitist in Madrid, where the large community of unoccupied nobility presented an ideal market. His unique ability to render likenesses that were faithful to the subject while subtly transforming it into a thing of beauty was most highly prized by the assorted duchesses and countesses of the city. Nevertheless, it was always Bravo’s intention to become a serious artist; in 1972 he left Madrid and his portraitist career to move to Tangier, Morocco, where the transfiguration of the commonplace has taken on new meaning in his remarkable studies of wrapped packages, a series begun in the mid-1960s and more recently reprised, to critically self-conscious and fascinating ends. Both a riff on the still-life tradition and a critique of contemporary formalism, the packages epitomize a career that has expertly bridged representation and abstraction, classicism and modernism, with finesse and painterly erudition. The earlier packages mark Bravo’s first serious preoccupation with abstraction and strike a balance between mimetic realism, with a nod to the Spanish still-life tradition, and the essentialist monochromes of color-field painting and their progeny that dominated the artistic landscape of the 1960s.
In the last years however, Bravo has concentrated on what some may consider the supreme achievement of his career: studies of colored papers. The papers are creased or crumpled, folded or twisted, ripped or torn and assembled to create compositional structure. In some cases the papers are suspended by string to a wall to form an odd, supernatural still life. In all the works one is mesmerized by Bravo’s command and use of the effects of light. Technically sophisticated, with marvelously obsessive attention to detail and convincing trompe-l’oeil, the high achievement of his series of paintings of colored papers is in the nature of their seeming simplicity, a simplicity which belies their complexity and which arrives at clarifying painting’s formal values of line, form, and color. Reminiscent of Rothko’s work, they are classic and modern, detailed and reductive, imaginative and inventive. “I’m now creating paintings that combine realism with a tendency toward abstract minimalism.”
