LUCIANA BRITO GALERIA: NEVER-BEFORE-SHOWN SERIES BY GERALDO DE BARROS

The curatorial concept of this show – which comes on the heels of the recent exhibition on Geraldo de Barros at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) of Geneva, Swit- zerland – considers the artist’s participation in the 15th Bienal de São Paulo, presenting on that basis a set of 66 silkscreen prints that recovers Barros’s idea to allow the public to reproduce his artworks. On the occasion of the 15th Bienal, Geraldo de Barros presented five paintings in oil on polyurethane lacquered wood, accompanied by the manifesto “Da retomada de alguns ob- jetos-forma da arte concreta” [On the Recovery of Some Form-Objects of Concrete Art], which set forth ideas related to concrete art (Design/painting-object) associated with the possibility of large-scale production, as is proper to industrialization. Through this “instruction manual,” the artist offered a completely new possibility to the visitors, giving them not only the elements for the reproduction of his artwork, but also an authorization for “each person or spectator to be provided with the elements of each one of the designs and thus be able to produce them,” thus eliminating the unique-object.

Years later, this project served as a basis for a profound study of Geraldo de Barros by the art- ist’s Archive, giving rise to the 66 silkscreen prints titled Objetos-Forma [Form-Objects]. The show also presents other works that contextualize this research by Geraldo de Barros, including some concretist paintings from the 1950s and more recent works in Formica. The Formica works present precisely the result envisioned by the artist, since he managed in fact to use industrial processes to gain the power of reproducibility in his artworks and to put them on the market.

Fotos

The exhibition Objetos-Forma is an homage to Geraldo de Barros, whose long-standing desire was to link the objectivism of concrete art to the refinement of design and the reproducibility of industry. As early as the 1950s, he began to experiment through his work with Unilabor, a coop- erative that produced furniture following constructivist references. After some years and with the country taken over by the military dictatorship, the artist saw that it would be nearly impos- sible to go forward with his ideas of breaking free from the rules of the market. In 1979, with the start of Brazil’s political reopening and the end of the boycott of successive editions of the Bienal by artists, newly encouraged by a regained sense of freedom and the reencounters of that time, Geraldo de Barros saw the possibility of realizing his desire to make art more accessible through the “do-it-yourself” concept.

About Geraldo de Barros

1923, Xavantes, Brasil – 1998, São Paulo, Brasil

Geraldo de Barros is a key name of 20th-century Brazilian art. Combining his first studies on painting with a later interest in photography, he pushed the envelope of the traditional photographic processes, questioning the classic rules of composition. Geraldo de Barros took a formal concern – as clearly seen in Brazilian concretism, in which participated intensely – and managed to merge this with his social con- cerns, leading him to approach the industrial processes in his work, dealing coherently with geometric constructions, reproducibility, the socialization of art, the theory of form and industrial design.