How one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism Hélio Oiticica
presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his
intensive color-architectures.
"The IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges: in
short, IMAGE is not the work's supreme motive or unifying end*.*"--Hélio
Oiticica
At the turn of the 1950s-1960s, one of the leading artists of
Neo-Concretism, Hélio Oiticica, presaged the unique trajectory of
Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures. In
the wake of this vivência of "time-color," which subordinates the
aesthetic to the sensorimotor powers of color, Oiticica's
transcategorial, transmedia works critically and clinically undermine
physical and social architecture, while semiotically subverting the
forms of domination exerted by the image.
In this culmination of their reassessment of the relation among art,
philosophy, and the contemporary, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne show
how these works are exemplary not only of a truly diagrammatic thought
and practice, but also of the South's resistance against the coldly
indifferent globalism endemic to the pacified institutions of
contemporary art. Oiticica's tropicalization of the commonplaces of
sixties art signals the latent potential of a marginal dissidence from
both the aesthetic form of art and the conceptual form of anti-art.
