World Standards Day poster 2001

About the Brazilian artist : Carla Fatio

A painter by profession, Carla Fatio is also an Art Teacher at the University of Santo Amaro (UNISA), São Paulo, Brazil, for students in the field of Pedagogy. Before turning towards Art Education as an Art Teacher of contemporary arts, she worked in a wide range of areas of design and creation, for fashion and advertising, among others. She has held many exhibitions either as a solo artist or together in collective exhibitions, in Brazil, in the USA, and in the Netherlands, and won awards in the field of contemporary art in Japan and Brazil. "I have recently come across a still growing but already fine artist: the young painter Carla Fatio," said, just four years ago, a prominent member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics, Olivio Tavares de Araujo.

This year, another respected art critic, Enock Sacramento, also a member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics, confirming her status, described her work: "Carla Fatio's paintings, besides being plastic, concrete and presenting reality, show more than they are, and suggest more than they explain. Her paintings are rich in nuances." And, says Elvira Vernaschi, a member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics, and former director of MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Sao Paulo, "Carla Fatio allows her magic world to be seen with delicate tones of blue, like those that can only be found in cosmic space." The subtle gradations of blue, too, of the sky and the sea, we could add, that mankind is so anxious to preserve, and that standards are playing their part in helping to protect.

As Enock Sacramento further remarks, Carla Fatio's paintings have their origins in the earth - in the mountains, in the fields, in the pollen and "that blend nature with feelings, allusions with transcendences." Her intimate relationship with the environment and all that surrounds her made her the ideal artist to illustrate the theme of this year's World Standards Day.

In her paintings, "there are vestiges, tiny vestiges," says the well-known critic Jacob Klintowitz, a member of ABCA, (the Brazilian Association of Art Critics), "drawings that can be guessed amid layers of pigments, ardent memories - an intimate diary for only the interested observer." She is inhabited by an intense and energetic interior life, for certain - but her vitality and passion for life outside, for nature, for art and for the world around us drew her naturally towards the notion of bringing art to within the reach of all. She coordinated a philanthropic project, "The Iconography of a Space", in which slum-dweller children learned how to recycle rubbish and turn it into objects of art. In this painting that she created especially for World Standards Day 2001, the Brazilian artist in her personal and direct way brings home the message: Standards and the Environment - Close together.

Contact the artist at cffatio@hotmail.com