Flávio Shiró Tanaka

Flávio Shiró Tanaka was born in 1928 in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan. As a painter, draftsman, printmaker, and set designer, he developed a style known as non-figurative lyrical realism, where the influence of Brazilian nature is evident through vegetation, fauna, and human elements. Flávio Shiró is considered one of the first significant representatives of young Brazilian painting, having begun his career in Brazil with expressionist works in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, he dedicated himself to abstraction, and from 1960, he began to explore the fusion between figuration and abstraction, using dark colors and balancing textures with chromatic stains. According to Walter Zanini, black is essential in his paintings, describing his method as action painting, characterized by long and dizzying vectors with curves and broken lines that stabilize the dionysian polychromy of the works. Georges Boudaille notes that, despite his background, orientalism is absent in Shiró's work, whose lines and the rapid expressiveness of the drawing highlight his appreciation for line without implying a predefined order in his work. For Boudaille, his works are marked by realism with clear subjectivity.

Frederico Morais observes that Shiró's works are far from the market and the media, considering the act of painting in his studio almost as a religious ritual. Despite this, he does not disconnect from issues such as politics, economy, and technology, but maintains a humanist outlook that prevails in his art.