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MADE TO FLY

Betty and Luiz Carlos Bettiol share a passion for life and a collection of over 2,000 pieces of art.

“I decided I wanted to learn to fly. To fly. I got my license with my husband and we bought a small plane. It was the most fascinating thing that could happen in my life,” says Betty Bettiol about the key moment in her passion for art. A fruitful passion, which has generated a collection of more than 2,000 pieces of art, crafts and design, one of the main collections of Brazilian art in the Federal District.

In this little plane, Betty and Luiz Carlos Bettiol crossed the country visiting cities, collecting stories, friends and art objects. They explored a deep Brazil, cut by few roads but with many stories and creativity, far from the cold machinery of the metropolis and wrapped up in the rhythm of nature and the time of things.

On their plane, Betty and Luiz built a bridge between the traditional and the modern, perhaps unwittingly reproducing the founding spirit of Brazilian modernism, oscillating between local tradition and the universal avant-garde. The Bettiols' attentive, personal and affectionate look at art brought together the sacred, the popular and the modern in a single collection, reproducing a microcosm of an optimistic and dreamy Brazil, which was building its future without losing sight of its past.

The roots of the Brazilian people

“Luiz and I knew the roots of the Brazilian people, the caboclo, the caiçara, from north to south, from Piauí to Rio Grande do Sul, the whole of Brazil. Every weekend we would go to a town, buy a piece, get to know a real craftsman. Authentic, legitimate pieces, I got to know each of the authors, had lunch with each one, got to know their lives,” Betty recalls.

Her story shows a spontaneous and natural relationship with the production process and the artist himself. A passion born of the need to search and connect. “I never bought a painting thinking about the financial value, I always liked the painting first, and second, I wanted to meet the artist. They all became my friends!” says Betty.

Arrival in the central plateau

Betty and Luiz Carlos' passion for art goes back a long way. In their youth, both she and Luiz Carlos frequented the “clubinho”, as the Clube dos Artistas e Amigos da Arte (Artists and Friends of Art Club) was called, a reference space for the modernist avant-garde of the plastic arts in São Paulo in the 1950s and 1960s.

Newlyweds, they arrived in Brasília in the early 1960s, pioneers in the bare land between the great empty spaces of the federal capital. With a law degree from USP, Luiz Carlos Bettiol signed one of the first registrations for the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) in the newly created Federal District, beginning a successful career in corporate law. Betty was settling into life in the new city, raising her children, and developing her interest in art and artistic production, exploring Portuguese tapestry embroidery techniques at the time.

On a trip to Bahia, she came across the artist Genaro de Carvalho, one of the exponents of the Brazilian modernist avant-garde, who, like her, was dedicated to tapestry. “I was delighted! Imagine meeting a Brazilian tapestry artist with that modern carpet. Wonderful!” This enchantment made Genaro's work the number one piece in the couple's nascent collection.

The lake house

As the Bettiols settled in the capital, their interest in art grew and the size of the collection and the space needed to accommodate it took over the family's space and life. They moved from a small house on W3 South to a large apartment in Plano Piloto, and finally to their final home on a plot of land by Lake Paranoá.

“I saw that it would be good to buy other things, instead of worrying about other things... Why not be more interested in art?” reflects Betty, who adds: ”It was already something I was born with. Little by little we bought a little something here, a little something there, and suddenly I realized that my house was already cramped, I had too much stuff, the children had grown up... and we decided to move to an apartment with a lot of space. Naturally, we bought more pieces of art.”

At the end of the 1970s, construction began on the house at the logo, next to the Yacht Club, at the same address where the couple who had recently arrived in the capital would go to watch the sunset at the end of the afternoon. The project was designed by architect José Zanine, a “wood wizard”, as Betty puts it.

Zanine was one of the exponents of Brazilian modernism, known for his large, glass-fronted wooden houses by the sea in Joatinga, Rio de Janeiro, built in the 1960s and 1970s. Large spaces and proximity to nature were the guiding principles behind the design of the Bettiols' final home on the banks of the Paranoá.

The house was filled with a collection of modern, sacred and popular Brazilian art pieces, and occupied with furniture custom-designed by Zanine himself, classic pieces by modernist exponents such as Sérgio Rodrigues, Jorge Zalszupin, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Maurício Azeredo, an artist based in Pirenópolis (GO).

“The house is alive, it moves, we hear the sound of wood cracking. The clay, the glass, it's a house made with elements of nature,” says Betty about the place where she lives and, she says, it's not a museum. It's not a museum because it has life. The same life that creates art, that makes it fly, and inspires everyone who meets Betty and Luiz Carlos Bettiol.