Hélio Oiticica: labyrinth–world
Fred Coelho
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. 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. 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. His personal challenge was to give body to color.
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. Each new plastic step was followed by elaborate new theoretical written material. In his writing, a private history of color emerges between the lines, something that was thoroughly thought through and executed by the artist. 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 all these texts (mainly from the 1960s) there is a double movement between color and narrative. 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. 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. They are members of the same family, they are deliriously colorful, plastic creations that emerge through metamorphosis, one from another.
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. 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 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. 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. Color, therefore, is the action that (dis)organizes the two-dimensional field, generating new experiences.
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. 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. 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.
As 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. His Reliefs and Nucleus, three-dimensional structures, still made to be contemplated, later unfold into what he would call his Penetrables. Here, monochromatic cubicles allow us to enter the space-time of color with our own bodies, immersing them in this architecture of light.
The body sees color. In his search for activating other senses in this chromatic relationship with the world, Oiticica follows a path towards the making of his Bólides – objects that give form to pigments, structures created by the artist to, simultaneously, encapsulate and expand the body of color. In some of these works, new materials begin to emerge from the exercise. The yellow comes out of the wood and overflows onto the moving surface of the nylon mesh, announcing the idea of a color beyond paint and vision. Now, it is possible to touch the fabric and to feel its chromatic texture.
This passage – from the color in the material to the material of the color – occurs in concert with something Oiticica called the “discovery of the body”, that is, during the period he was immersed in the community of Mangueira and in its school of samba. The samba dancers’ moving bodies and the contact with a new racial, social, sensorial and sexual life dimension led to the creation of his Parangolés, a definitive chapter in this trajectory of color in space. The rigorous selection of colors gives room to the use of textures from different materials – canvases, flags and capes made with different fabrics – which radically expand the artist’s vocabulary in relation to his work. His environmental program, that is, the dialogue between a plastic practice with the space, the spectator and their participation (or lack of) in the proposition at play, removes the experience of art from closed museums launching it towards the world, and from art galleries towards the public space of the streets.
After this intense journey of color in the 1960s, a 1970 Guggenheim Foundation Grant took the artist to Manhattan, where he lived uninterruptedly for seven years. Already moving away from the frequent production of objects and more engaged with new media, such as cinema, conceptual writing and photography, the issues that had emerged in the previous decade were transformed into new meanings. His Parangolés made in New York are less malleable, more distant from the myth and the samba and closer to the mundane and the urban. However, within his investigation into color, the Cosmococas, Oiticica’s quasi-cinematic installations created in collaboration with Neville D’Almeida in 1973, enjoy unavoidable prominence. The two artists turned cocaine into pigment, linking the powder to the pure luminosity of Malevich’s white on white monochromatic experiments.
In this exhibition hosted by Gomide&Co and Projeto Hélio Oiticica, we have the privilege to see, for the first time, a domestic version of CC4 – Nocagions. In Oiticica’s installation guidelines, put together on August 24, 1973, we see that he is still drawing on John Cage’s famous work Notations but expanding towards two masters of invention, the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. In this domestic version, the artist duo in Manhattan invited the artist duo in São Paulo for an action specifically designed for the Brazilian city. Fifty years later, the encounter is finally happening. The present version also contains a new sound layer: Caetano Veloso’s reading of the poem dias, dias, dias by Augusto de Campos. Written in 1953, recorded in 1973, we witness a work of unrested multiple temporalities. With Veloso’s song-speech resounding through the work of Neville and Oiticica, the quasi-cinema of the Cosmococas, the Concretes’ verbal-vocal-visual polyhedron, and the bonds created in the 1960s around Tropicália are deepened and refreshed in themselves.
What we see in the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: mundo-labirinto [Hélio Oiticica: labyrinth-world] are some of the entry points to and passages in the creative process of an artist in a constant movement of transgression. In his encounter with Neville D’Almeida, world and labyrinth are expanded one over the other, providing endless continuity to the revolution of color, time, space and image. Paints, wooden boards, pigments, fabrics and cocaine form a spiral, which, whilst presenting us with a history of these artworks, also offer us new ways of retelling it.
From color we came and to color we return.
