The title of this exhibition, Leste do Éden [East of Eden], is a direct reference to the biblical Land of Nod, where Cain lived after killing his brother, Abel. Living in Nod, east of Eden, is, ultimately, a punishment. Without the abundance of the lost paradise, it was up to Cain’s descendants to recreate the order and harmony of the Garden of Eden with all their human limitations. It is worth mentioning that this exile led to literary classics such as East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck, which, naturally, was about family conflict.

The idea here, however, is to recover a lost harmony. Facing the violence of exile, these three great painters from different eras did not respond by seeking refuge in the past. Rather, they decided to move onward, creating a world of their own to survive the collapse of paradise as described in the Old Testament.

In order of “appearance” on the east side of Eden, the first in the list is Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari (1861–1938, Montevideo, Uruguay), followed by Júlio Martins da Silva (1893, Icaraí – 1978, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), from Rio de Janeiro, and Paulo Pasta (1959, Ariranha, Brazil), from São Paulo, represented in these two simultaneous exhibitions by Estação and Millan, in collaboration with Sur gallery.

These three painters all share this sense of exile, evident in the transfigured landscapes in this exhibition, sometimes idyllic, as in Júlio Martins da Silva’s canvases, sometimes allegorical (Pedro Figari), or atmospheric (as in Paulo Pasta’s works). In the modern, multifaceted world, which has been characterized by fragmentation (especially environmental) for over a century, it would be unlikely for any of them to succumb to the temptation of painting naturalistic landscapes.

The landscapes by Figari and Pasta result from an erudite vision formed by the reverent observation of paintings by the masters. It is worth remembering that in 1930s Paris, the Uruguayan painter was a friend of the post-impressionists Bonnard and Vuillard and the Fauvist Marquet. His painting, which recalls the Uruguayan landscape in exile, reflects enough of each of them to attest to that admiration.

Paulo Pasta, today also a master, began his career painting landscapes exactly 40 years ago. In his first solo show, he exhibited sugar cane fields beneath a tempestuous sky, works that would be better described as anti-landscapes, somewhat in the sense that T.S. Eliot established (in The Wasteland) to demolish the false dichotomy between nature and culture. In essence, Pasta’s landscape moves towards Cézanne. It seeks light above all, even if it is hidden under dark clouds.

It may seem paradoxical that this landscape foreshadows a storm or depicts the confinement of the east of Eden in such a seductive and illuminated way. But is that not also true of the cultivated garden in Júlio Martins da Silva’s canvases, a painter without education who learned grammar to read poetry? In both cases, it is about painting something that is no longer there.

Júlio, the grandson of African slaves and son of illiterate parents, was born in Icaraí, Niterói, raised in the countryside, lived in a shack, and only became a painter because of a need to recreate the Garden of Eden. The Lutheran took on this mission, obsessed by the verb “to evolve” (he preferred “to perfect”). And he did it with a landscape of houses that look like temples, all within the most absolute order and symmetry, things that only exist in the afterlife.

If Figari pursued the pastoral, Virgilian scenery of the Uruguayan Pampas in the urban Paris of the 1930s, confronting modernizing violence in his canvases, Júlio escaped to the dreamlike, inexistent garden, denouncing the prejudices between classes that prevented (and still prevent) the socially disinherited from dreaming about “a gift-wrapped world.” In fact, this was the title Pasta chose for the exhibition he curated of the religious Júlio’s work at the Estação gallery in 2012.

The agnostic Pedro Figari, meanwhile, did not see the expanse of Uruguayan Pampas as sacred territory. However, Jorge Castillo, a great student of his work, said that Figari sought in that immensity “the infinite beauty that religions promise after death,”  and perhaps that is the common denominator that unites these three artists, recovering the Edenic placidity associated with eternal sleep. Or the suspension of time, as suggested in the posts or sugar cane factory chimneys in the desert-like immensity of Pasta’s rural landscapes.

Sometimes, in returning to the pre-historic world, Figari commented on the fiasco of modern rationality. He painted “troglodytes” playing flutes beneath the moon in canvases where there is no distinction between the natural and supernatural worlds. In them, everything seems deformed, out of place, like a Bonnardian sketch of his pantheistic belief in vague, imprecise forms. Ultimately, Figari painted sensations. The ombu, a monumental symbol of the Uruguayan Pampas, does not look like just a tree in his paintings but an entity suggestive of animism.

One could say the same of one of Pasta’s trees: they bear witness to the passage of time in his world of silence and light, a record of the serenity of the finite. It was painting that taught Pasta to see things, to reconnect with a fundamental moment in human history. In the end, perhaps Eden is not a garden replete with tidy flowerbeds, like the delicate Júlio painted, but a land where nature seems just an echo of our loneliness and agony. That is what his landscape is about.