![]() ![]() This is why we keep moving on and returning. How Oiticica's planes catch the light matters, and so too how his colour refreshes, then saturates, then tires the eye. You notice how necessary it is to have dulled colours among the bright, thoughtful gradations as well as straight-from-the tube explosions. In one entirely yellow work, the colour goes from near-olive to acidic lemon, through heavy barium yellow to a dry-leaf khaki. I never realised just how good a painter Oiticica was until now. The surfaces are both lush and reserved, painted with a formal rightness that keeps the colour trembling and in its place, but as though it were straining for the freedom of the air. His paintings and reliefs are well-crafted, handmade things that invite respect. If Oiticica's art is pleasurable, light and open-ended, it is also deeply serious and rigorous. Art was always about relationships - even the most hard-assed modernism - but most of the time, audiences were too uptight to notice. Nowadays, we call this kind of installation "relational aesthetics". At the time, no one knew what to make of Oiticica's live macaws, nests for visitors to crawl into, indoor beach and jungles of foliage. On Tate Modern's fifth floor, several rooms within the collection have been devoted to Brazilian art of the 1960s, and to Oiticica's sojourn in London in 1968, when, largely through the auspices of critic Guy Brett, the artist installed his Eden in the Whitechapel Art Gallery. They managed to take modernism somewhere its European forebears, and North-American contemporaries never imagined. As much as they embraced neo-constructivism and rationalism, order and rigour, they rejected hermeticism, or dry academic formalism, even though they were preoccupied by form and rhythm. These artists invited viewers to engage with their work in open and sometimes physical ways. Theirs was a modernism freed from northern, protestant restraint, and an art that strove to go beyond the gallery and the closed world of the market. The fact that Tate Modern is mounting this show, and has been buying Oiticica's work for the collection, is testimony to the artist's increasing posthumous reputation and influence, along with that of his friends and colleagues Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape. This is a captivating exhibition, in which it is a pleasure to linger, even though it takes us only halfway through Oiticica's career. It comes as a jolt to realise that the works in the first room of The Body of Colour, Oiticica's Tate Modern show, were completed when he was just 18. Luckily for us, he was prolific and however much of a hippy he appeared (the hair, the flares, the Afghan coat), or how wholeheartedly he embraced 1960s counter-cultural excess, he remained a serious and inventive artist. Oiticica died in 1980, aged 42, following a stroke. But there is nothing hidden in these envelopes except an idea. These sprightly, angular little shapes, with their sharp and flattened edges, also remind me of folded paper wraps passed furtively from hand to hand between drug dealer and client. They are not really birds, but in my mind I see two hands fluttering as they manipulate the card, score, fold and paint them. They look like origami birds, which one can imagine flying out of a 1920s Suprematist or constructivist canvas to alight on a Paul Klee tree. Prestel-Verlag, Munich 1993.Oiticica first developed these forms through a series of card maquettes. ![]() Jahrhundert, Catalog for the exhibition of the same name in Cologne. Sullivan, Lateinamerikanische Künstler des 20. These works had essential points in common with Minimal Art, which was emerging at the same time in other countries. In "bólides" there are glass jars filled with earth, gauze, and other materials, as well as boxes with unusual openings, painted yellow, salmon-red, pink or red. ![]() The expressions are not to be taken literally, but in the sense of energy centers which draw people spiritually and physically - like fire, as stated once by the artist. For Oiticica, these expressions are very important in bringing the chaos of reality into order. Guy Brett, who has contributed most toward the understanding of the artist, explains that the works are connected through the meaning of the Portuguese word "bólide": fireball, nucleus, glowing meteor. Oiticica divides his work into different categories: "bólide", "penetravel" and "parangolé". ![]()
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