Poços de Caldas, Brazil, 1954

Twenty years ago, Teodoro Dias dedicated himself exclusively to painting after working for twenty years as an agronomist. Many of the colors that appear in his works come from paints produced from different types of soil collected by him and stored meticulously in bottles labeled with information about the places of origin. “I look a lot at the sun, the earth, the contrast between the earth and the vegetation,” he said, “my reference is the nature.” Something from the agronomist’s perspective, inserted in the context of the paintings, blending in the color field combinations, resumes for the viewer of the paintings. The “farm colors” survive in the painting not because of agronomy, but because that agronomist saw the world with a special look, only his, so that the reference that they make to nature could survive.

Because of the sensitivity to differences, this modern and contemporary aesthetic, accumulated experience emerges in the form of painting; a mute life acquires communicability thanks to the strength of the stroke, the combinations between the colors and the rhythm of the fields of color. In harmony with the painting of Teodoro Dias we are in contact with an opening for the relations between things instead of considering the world as the container of things locked within themselves.

José Bento Ferreira, “The Power of the Stroke”, 2017