At the fountain, the painters wash the face of the dawn.

Entrepreneurs and workers, men and women in all trades, build the metallic framework of civilization. However, the task of revealing the soul of peoples, yesterday and forever, was the noble mission of artists.

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Through artistic manifestations, the historical experience of the people finds its imperishable testimony.

To understand Rio Grande, there is no better trail than traveling through the works of Simões Lopes Neto, his stories and stories, and Erico Verissimo in “O Tempo e o Vento”, a true cultural gateway to the São Pedro Continent. And so, along the paths of this vast world, out in the countryside, it is always art fulfilling its role as a deponent. Rio de Janeiro is in Tom Jobim, and the Brazilian northeast, in the painter of “Retirantes”, Candido Portinari.

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Let's have the feminine revolution , there it is in the novel “Madame Bovary”, by Gustave Flaubert; the affirmation of youth identity we find stamped in John Steinbeck's tragic realism, in the novel and film “The Grapes of Wrath”; George Orwell is, messianically, the herald of a computed civilization; and the examples would go on ad infinitum.

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I stick to the pictorial plane of gauchesca art . I travel in time, I go to meet Molina Campos and his caricatural arts, full of humor and synthesis. Under the emblem “Alpargatas”, these works   also traveled the Rio Grande, causing laughter and enchantment, filling the memory of successive generations.

I travel through the work of the Argentine artist Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós , with his series “Los gauchos”, and the Uruguayans, highlighting here Manuel Rosé, Pedro Figari, Rafael Barradas.

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In Rio Grande, the art of Pedro Weingärtner stands out , exquisite in the line, embracing the soul of our gauchos campeiros. And, later, Nelson Jungluth, brilliant colorist, unmistakable style, who, together with Danúbio Gonçalves, through charqueadas, testify to the Rio Grande of yesterday and always, with exemplary traits.

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Behold, the painter Alejandro Arnutti emerges among us.

In my house, I display his “Tropa Astra Astra” panel. He delights potential visitors. You can feel the dust in the air and the foals gallop, such is perfectionism. He is the painter we needed to reassert ourselves on the pictorial plane. In his work, this magnificent cultural identity emerges that involves and brings together the Uruguayan gaucho and the gaucho of the Brazilian pampa, as indivisible human realities. I say, with light ink, that Rio Grande is an Uruguay that speaks Portuguese.

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Of his art, let me say:   his horses in the waters, drinking in the evening light, are of stunning lyrical beauty. The face of our old gauchos, where time traces the trails, portraying the dewy melenas of the campeiros. They are works of feeling the wind landing on the face and the time shaping striking, heroic, everyday, emblematic features.

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Horses, of different coats , due to their precious art, know how to capture the length of their manes balanced by the wind. And they are old ladies, appeased by tenderness, who put the white, soft and innocent tenderness of the sheep in their laps. Lambs, lowing between the frames of the old mango gates. Grooming, butchering, witnessed with a precise hand and the magical gift of revealing the real in absolute syntheses.

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And what about the cattle and horse troops! They raise dust and surprise, in an unusual dazzle. And they reach vast expanses of enchantment that only a great artist can provoke. Their snares ensnare us, and we are trapped by the grace of these magnificent, opportune and necessary works.

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Let us be with him, in the living expressions of his art.

Rio Grande won an award, received the legacy of a beautiful artistic heritage, was graced with a reflective mirror, where our soul is reflected. About Alejandro Arnutti's work, we can say that today his work ensures his presence in the gallery of the great painters of our gaucho theme. It was an unusual honor to adorn this work with footnotes, modest pedestals for his multiple creative work.

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In Alejandro Arnutti, we have the perceptive eye to capture the exact form of the composition. A vision of the movement apprehended in its variants in space and time. A heightened sensitivity to colors, where the real and the imaginary run free through the fields of his art. The varied nuances of the pampa overflow from his brushes.

So I see.

So I think.

This is how I feel the work of Alejandro Arnutti

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Luiz Colonel

writer