Here, monochromatic cubicles allow us to enter the space-time of color with our own bodies, immersing them in this architecture of light. His Reliefs and Nucleus, three-dimensional structures, still made to be contemplated, later unfold into what he would call his Penetrables. By displacing us from the contemplative and mechanical gaze of traditional figuration and plunging us into the dynamic thought of color, the artist seeks to trigger a different type of fruition, whose duration is one of the central elements in the experience.Īs such, the action of (de)materializing a monochromatic plane into three-dimensional reliefs, suspending them in the exhibition space, gives Oiticica the freedom to think about color and painting beyond our eyes. In the passage from the two-dimensional field of the gouaches, metaschemes and monochromatics to the three-dimensional space of the Bilaterals, Reliefs, Nuclei and Penetrables, Oiticica situates the issue of the spectator as a participant in the work. In the phase that ensued, the adoption of a warm palette of yellows, oranges and reds (with paints created by the artist himself) connected to the artist’s monochromatic research into colors and their relation to the exhibition space and the spectator. Color, therefore, is the action that (dis)organizes the two-dimensional field, generating new experiences. How to provide body to color? How to make it something integrated into the exhibition environment? Guided by painter-thinkers such as Malevich, Mondrian and Paul Klee, Oiticica’s aesthetic intention was to remove from color its static rationality, to leave it to pulsate in its pure space-time plasticity. In his early career, in those works linked to the Grupo Frente and the period known as neo-concretism, color was thought about in two dimensions: time and structure. From the start (he was very young, not yet 18 years old) to the end (also very young, only 42 years old), we follow the constant movement (with comings and goings, refusals and re-encounters) of an artist who, even though radically immersed in the “dematerialization of the art object” in the 1970s, always called himself a painter. In this private history of color, the most evident element is the passage from the metaphysical to the physical – that is, from the intellectual and abstract plane to the bodily and ordinary plane. They are members of the same family, they are deliriously colorful, plastic creations that emerge through metamorphosis, one from another. At each new stage, when themes acquire new layers, the artist gives his works names that claim singular existences: Metaschemes, Reliefs, Penetrables, Bólides and Parangolés. With a practice where the act of writing is paramount, Oiticica turns color into a character that accompanies the author alongside his oeuvre and life. In all these texts (mainly from the 1960s) there is a double movement between color and narrative. Here, I don’t mean history in the sense of historical (factual and memorialist) knowledge but in the sense of a narrative (or a program, as the artist called it) with connections, outcomes, causes and effects. In his writing, a private history of color emerges between the lines, something that was thoroughly thought through and executed by the artist. Each new plastic step was followed by elaborate new theoretical written material. With an intense career spanning just over one decade, Hélio Oiticica created an uninterrupted narrative flow to define the transformations that occurred in his work. His personal challenge was to give body to color. Like his friend and interlocutor Lygia Clark, Oiticica began to set his path and develop his art with the proposition to overcome the two-dimensional surface. The geometric abstraction of forms, monochromatic transgressions and the incorporation of ordinary materials into the composition of a painting were some of the symptoms which culminated in the “crisis of the flat surface” during the 1950–60s. The artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) from Rio de Janeiro emerged into the art field when the traditional foundations of Western painting had reached a peak as far as its modern impasse was concerned. Hélio Oiticica: labyrinth–world Fred Coelho
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