“...The true purpose of these paintings has something to do with mood. Despite an obvious thematic similarity to David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, there is something a little deeper going on here. Hockney is known for his use of blazing California sunshine, and white is his dominant color, while Duprat’s scenes are somber and nocturnal. With Hockney’s swimmers, you smell the chlorine. With Duprat’s you can feel the algae.
The ripples and reflections on the surface of the water are often reduced to relatively simple geometric impressions. These impressions sometimes make up a pattern of lozenges on the square tiles at the bottom or side of the pool.
But in other works there is no reference to swimming pools, the swimmer is in a lake or in the sea. There is almost nothing solid in any of these pictures, except for a totally free human body – free of clothing, free of gravity, free even of an identity, since their faces are usually hidden by wavy hair or by an averted head...”
Tom Baker
Daily Youmiuri, Tóquio, abril de 2004
“... His work consolidates a permanent process of pictorial investigation in which light plays a structural role... the drawings develop in a subtle articulation of oriental transparencies which unfold in sheets of paper, in permanent movement that seem to invoke the passage of non-chronological time, determined by poetry and pain...”
Marcelo Mattos Araújo, São Paulo, 2006
“... in 2000 Duprat returns to Japan - where he had previously lived in his youth - and from now on there is a liberation and an enrichment of his palette. There is a renewed boldness in his execution as nature becomes a source of interest to his sensitive drawing... Light continues to be a tool in the creation of the image, now leading to dreamlike landscapes and the contemplation of spaces virtually structured by color.”
Vera Pedrosa, Rio de Janeiro, 2015
“... The painting of Marcos Duprat defines its own way laboriously owing nothing to the opportunism of both fashion and the art market. Also, it does not address the conceptual questions or the definition and role of art. The influences that come from the past - especially those of Italian post-impressionism - are not related to the academic connotations of post-modern classicism. Those influences are, in fact, used fully as authentic tools for an intensive personal quest. The critics are right to point out light as the leading element of this plastic universe. I would add that light is the very substance of Duprat’s pictorial space. All the magic of these paintings is the possibility of entering illusory spaces which unfold beyond the surface of the canvas. In his series of works “Passages”, the mystery of space is free from any prosaic detail. It is not the homogeneous and centralized space of classic painting, but, as the title suggests, the experience of a passage to a region of indefinite borders. One space leads to the other, and then that one to another... The open doors show as much as they hide. They almost stand as a symbol of vision, or of desire, always oblique and fragmented...”
Valeria Gonzalez, Professora da Universidade de Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, 2000
“... For decades I have followed Marcos Duprat`s diplomatic and artistic career. I have always admired the competence and dedication with which he has occupied positions of great responsibility attributed to him. However, his artistic career hasn`t involved only competence and dedication, but also the devotion and talent that he has always pursued. This is something very different: he dominates art, and art dominates him...”
José Mindlin, São Paulo, 2006
“... The language he invents has only three elements one organic, one abstract and the last is translucent... Light - the translucent element - integrates and wraps all the others...”
Carlos Rodriguez Saavedra, Lima, 1979
“... The three main elements in Duprat’s paintings are diving - the pool - the reflection - mirrors and Water - and light - usually passing through a door,or at the end of a staircase, where a human figure tries to reach out. Or it may also enter through a window, in the flemish style.
Marcos Duprat is not concerned to approach these themes from a psychological point of view – that is, why they where brought in, or why they remain in his work– but he reminds the viewer that the myth of Narcissus, the link between these three themes, is painful, for he dies. His concern – he states – is fundamentally formal, that is, he tries to keep a distance from both geometry and hyper-realism, so we can perceive the presence of the hand behind the irregular lines, the texture, those imperfections that make matter alive and vibrating. He insists in this issue because often in the reproduction of his works this human presence of the artist is not well perceived, overshadowed by an aseptic treatment that does not correspond to the tactile reality of the painting.
The painter talks about passages (rites of passage?) and this concept can bring together the two poles of his work: theme and form. Using diptychs may be a consequence of his way of unfolding the theme of his painting. But it may be also a new game, as the sequence of the two images unfolds and prolongs the representational space and simultaneously makes a statement on the physicality of the canvas. On the other hand, this pictorial surface is questioned as he paints the side borders and does not use frames, as if he wanted the painting to expand virtually across the edges of the canvas...”
Frederico de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, 1982
“... Throughout these years, Marcos Duprat has basically kept to the same subject matter. Nevertheless, his themes reemerge now with an enriched formal and chromatic structure – a change which can only be brought about by hard and concentrated work. The monologue sustained by his solitary figures facing the cosmos would inevitably demand the expansion of the physical space of the painting itself, and the canvases have consequently grown in dimension. The larger painting surface has created new problems which challenge the artist. The repeated duplication of the image and its reflection has called for duplication of symmetries, now in the tangible dimension of the diptychs. These diptychs tend to transform the nature of borders, allowing for the possibility of a sequence in a physical and mental space. In this dialogue, one part is always the answer to the question introduced by the other: the divers submerge but they will return; the nudity that faces shadows is rewarded by light.”
José Neistein, Washington, D.C., 1980 Feitura das Artes, Editora Perspectiva/ Série Debates/ Arte, 1981, S.P
“... Maybe Duprat’s true compositional ‘play’ is not that of setting ‘doubles’ but reaching out to a sort of multiplicity which works out as a continuous exchange of the parts, in such a fast transformation that the eye perceives it as absolutely static. The sense of time — the perception of the concept of transition, openly stated in so many “Passages”, a concept reinforced by the hallucinating sequence of doors, windows and corridors, where a body, a statue or a still life are each nothing but another different ‘presence’ — is finally enhanced through the handling of that effusion of light, which simultaneously reveals and hides. This sense of time is recognizable, in other cases, such as in those of the sets of repetitions of the same image with slight variations of colour and placement, scanning the space through photograms, as parts of a puzzle. Also, in these images, through the fragmentation of the same object, or the movement of clouds and waves, the artist not only simulates reality but projects it beyond. As if each moment was nothing but a pre-figuration of the next one...”
Roberto Sanesi, Milão, 1990
“... Time merely demarcates the succession of passages... Space is infinite and time is everywhere... time is circular and mythical.”
Jacob Klintowitz, Editora Raízes, São Paulo, 1985
