"Ten years ago, at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), I organized a retrospective exhibition of the works of Manabu Mabe, a Japanese-born Brazilian, considered a painter of outstanding personality.

         My first meeting with him took place during the first days of the MASP. I had heard of an artist who came from the coffee-planting area of Lins, who was determined to devote himself to painting. In his first attempts, he had tried his hand at landscapes, in a highly personal vision.

         But such avalanches motivated by tendencies are common occurrences in our annals, and history takes charge at the opportune moment of administering the right to survival. In this particular case, the survivors are few since the times when Ciurlionis, Kandinsky, Mondrian made anti-figurative waves under the auspices of cubism. Afterwards, abstractionism gained popularity. And Mabe became Brazil's liveliest representative of the tendency.

         His temperamet was fated to use the intermediary of colour symbology. He didn't need intermediations between idea and annotation: to manifest in the universe of calligraphic forms became an encouragement to manifest the lenguage of colour. Mabe goes to work without hesitation: whoever has seem him handle a brush, improvising on tissue paper spread out on the floor, with natural assurance, can imagine how emerges that swift streak of paint, smooth forms tending towards a magical amplitude, some harmonized in an unique hue, others in shocking contrast, others still balanced in the refined arabesques of friendly nuances.

         The result is always a chromatic sonority: intense, delirious, the closeness of colours in tight relation to shades attaining a luminous spatial quality. Fleeing the relative, Mabe aims at a rigourously absolute abstractionism to cofirm the absence of palliatives which could bring to mind figurative preferences.