Geraldo de Barros - renovation and constancy
Paulo Herkenhoff
Geraldo de Barros was involved in the early days of Brazilian art’s post-war renewal. He is a man of many instruments too: painter, photographer, graphic artist, and designer.
His consistent presence in the history of contemporary art in Brazil constantly aimed for discontinuity as a means of freeing himself from any need for canons or great accomplishments.
The 1950s in Brazil was perhaps one of the country’s most culturally robust periods. A favorable economic climate provided the scene for an ascendant ideology of ‘development-ism’ as the country advanced on the economic and cultural levels, in particular, while little progress was made socially, although there was some politically. The construction of Brasilia, along with projects in several other cities, showed the maturity of the modernist architects’ generation: Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, Reidy and others. In the bossa nova, Brazilian music found a synthesis of universal value at the end of the decade. In literature, writers such as Guimaraes Rosa, Clarice Lispector and João Cabral de Mello, as well as the Concrete poets, produced world-class work that brought out the many different aspects or realities of Brazil. Not forgetting the role of Murilo Mendes, from the 1930s onwards, or that of art critics in the 1950s, when Mario Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Waldemar Cordeiro, Decio Pignatari and the Campos brothers reached a level of theoretical reflection that would not be seen again until the mid-70s. The first cinema novo films were produced and a generation of directors discovered that was to be consolidated in the 1960s.Together with the growth of photo-journalism, photography reached a high level of constructivist language in the work of Geraldo de Barros and José Oticica Filho. The photography output in general of the Clube Bandeirantes group for (amateur) photographers and filmmakers was particularly noteworthy for its dozen leading figures that included Manarini, Yoshida, Giró, Salvatore, Farkas, Lorca, Tavares, Yalete, Atschul, and Gasparini. New art museums that had been created in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s were now flourishing. The São Paulo Biennial opened a channel for international interaction that would leave a profound impression on Brazilian art production and put the country on the world map of the arts.
In the visual arts, the discussion between abstract art and figuration discussion was soon dropped. Initially, it gave way to a clash between ‘informal art’ and constructivism, which then evolved on a theoretically profound level toward the late-60s split between São Paulo’s Concrete artists (among them Geraldo de Barros) and Rio de Janeiro’s neo-Concrete group.
The cultural clash was directly related to the development of Concrete art. Geraldo de Barros was to be one of the artists to initiate the conflict with figuration and elevate Concrete art movements to a higher theoretical level. As he himself writes, “ At that early stage, we believed in art that would be grounded on certain principles from gestalt, constructivism and mathematics, in the tradition of Vantongerloo, Mondrian, Malevich, van Doesburg , and Max Bill, whose work would be ‘objective, and could be mass produced industrially’. We conceived artworks as language rather than mere representations of reality external to them.”
This text briefly describes references and conclusions that were to develop in the late 40s and afterwards, gaining a solid basis with the 1952 manifesto issued by the Ruptura collective, of São Paulo, and then broadening and deepening the project in 1956 as Brazilian Concrete art attained nationwide reach and brought together artists from Rio and São Paulo. In the case of Geraldo de Barros, photography was to be the experience for which a constructivist rationale would be introduced, thus auguring his Concrete painting.
De Barros’ first major photographic work, Fotoformas (1949-50), rendered a pursuit of abstract forms that evolved from his interest in Klee’s production. In this respect, note that the Swiss work of Klee and Max Bill had a permanent influence on De Barros’ constructivist oeuvre.
In terms of its execution, Fotoformas pointed to one of the key stages in the de-sacralization of photography in Brazil, with painting’s unique and original aura morphing into an aura around photographic images too. De Barros imposed cross-sections, overlaid negatives, intervened on photo plates, physically cropped images mounted on hardboard -- “like sculptures”, as he describes them. However, with all these procedures, the pursuit of abstract images in photography led to a revisiting of the very purpose and status of photography itself, which became ‘body’, rather than a surface and a represented space, hence Waldemar Cordeiro’s use of the term ‘denaturalization’ in this respect. Photography had to be an autonomous self-referential reality. Professor Pietro Maria Bardi analyzed De Barros’ work in 1950 and wrote: “Geraldo fights shy of photographing reality. He would say that he does not understand it. Without working around it, he seeks to discover pure essences for use in his mediations: refined lines amid revelations, and lights reduced to schemes, the origins of which cannot be reconstructed.”
The work of De Barros also played a role in encouraging the first critics in Brazil to take a contemporary approach to photography that looked beyond represented images, in the form of the writings of Pietro Maria Bardi and Waldemar Cordeiro. Their only real precursor in this respect was a foreword to “Pintura em Pânico” [painting in panic] by Murilo Mendes, dated 1943.
In 1952, de Barros was involved with the Ruptura manifesto. It was the first time an artistic collective had stood up for a coherent position with a clearly defined aesthetic project and high quality work, consistent with their theoretical premises. Their blows were aimed at “all varieties and hybridizations of naturalism” and “hedonistic non-figuration”, which they saw as “old-fashioned”.
In Latin America, constructivist languages that flourished from the 1940s through the 60s in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela, related to plans for culture based on aspirations for modernization and development.
The Ruptura collective, of São Paulo, was to lean toward the Concrete movement, while pursuing rigor and raising a plethora of political, philosophical and pragmatic questions. Concepts such as objectivity, rationality and productive art were governed by premises such as: “There is no artistic sensibility. Only the actual work is artistic… Art differs from pure thought because it is material; it differs from original things because it is thought.” (Waldemar Cordeiro, 1958). Cordeiro goes on: “A new dimension has now emerged: time. Time as movement. Representation, then, transcends the plane, but as movement rather than perspective. Chromatic value structurally regulates color, which acts through the contrast of complementary colors. Interest in vibration reflects an aspiration for motion. Our art is the Baroque art of two-dimensionality.” Technical procedures included industrial paints applied smoothly and uniformly, no brushstroke left an imprint behind.
The Concrete art of De Barros went on to produce flat-surface paintings, applying paint smoothly and uniformly for an “industrial” finish. His extreme chromatic frugality led to black and white – and occasionally gray – areas, or to the coexistence of red and white areas. Always opposites, never a presence of many “colors”. However, this ascetic, rational and objective rigor, at certain points includes incisive lines between two planes. These incisions again refer us to his photography, with its cuts, croppings, insertions and splicings revealing a notion of the two-dimensional work’s corporeality. These incisions are posed as constructivist resources, rather than expressive intentions.
In the mid-60s, the exhaustion of certain issues and approaches characteristic of Concrete artists, the aftermath of the burst of pop art and new figuration onto the scene, and the deepening of the social and political crisis in Brazil saw a radical transformation in the interests of many artists. Rio de Janeiro’s neo-Concrete artists initially reinstated the subject (artist / audience) in the works of artists such as Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Pape, Hercules Barsotti, Willy de Castro, Franz Weissman, Helio Oticica, or Lygia Clark. The neo-Concrete critic Ferreira Gullar was involved with cultural activities in community centers. Clark’s works moved closer to viewers as she addressed her phenomenological and psychoanalytic concerns. Oiticica turned to anthropological issues with a sensual tone that led him to samba, favelas and Rio’s underworld.
Other Brazilian geometric and constructivist artists parted with the rigor of the 1950s. Milton Dacosta did his voluminous, baroque Venus paintings; Maria Leontina, her non-angular Bandeiras; Serpa embraced a type of figuration inspired by the approach of the CoBrA collective, and Volpi composed his chromatic symphony with less help from a ruler. The photographer José Oiticica Filho took to experimenting with blotches and, in some cases, exploring the multiplicity of possible hues of black. Waldemar Cordeiro developed the popconcreto concept from his combination of Concrete and pop. Meanwhile, a new generation of artists was emerging and fiercely manipulating the iconography of mass culture.
In the 1960s, De Barros was interested in images featuerd in the mass media, anime, hoardings and television, shuffling the issues of pop and new figuration in his collages and images that were painted-over and cropped or sectioned. Among the collages and glued-paper reliefs, on their junctures, his work revisited affinities with his Fotoformas and Concrete painting. His combinations of parts with areas or images retain traces of their procedures. In the 50s, Concrete art could be associated with the utopia of national development, whereas in the 60s the turn to critical figuration would pose an urgent necessity, within the cultural milieu, for a dialectical intervention in the material conditions of Brazilian society, its dominant ideologies and existing authoritarian rule.
This same ‘junctures’ aspect is again found in De Barros’ current “paintings”, i.e., works executed on Formica in which different planes (=color patches) are joined in the same “puzzle”. At this point, he is revisiting his former Concrete-art concerns and coherently relating concepts that have governed his work in the past (space, color, working procedures, perception of the gaze, etc.). However, now the latter have been transformed and confronted with new realities to finally determine a new poetics. It is from this existential period that his experience has enabled him to distill wisdom.