below: Untitled, 1956, gouache on cardboard.
César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro
right: Leg and torso of a Mangueira resident refl ected on the inside of
B9 Box Bólide 07, 1964. AHO/ PHO, RJ. Photo: Andreas Valentim
facing page, above: Grand Nucleus (comprising NC3, NC4 and NC6),
1960–6, oil and resin on wood fi breboard, 670 x 975 cm

facing page, below: B17 Glass Bólide 05, ‘Homenagem a Mondrian’ ,
1965, oil with polyvinyl acetate emulsion on nylon mesh and burlap, glass,
paint and pigment suspended in water. César and Claudio Oiticica
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
Oiticica, that meant the non-figurative art of Malevich, Klee, Kandinsky What followed was a decade of intense research into how
and, pre-eminently, Mondrian, rather than the surrealists fetching up in colour might transcend painting and become experienced as
New York. It was an interest which, as in the US, came with both a time something material and physical, as much as visual, all the while
delay and a sense of geographical dislocation, and it’s that negotiation embodying that sense of escaping the mundane reality of everyday
of time and locality that Oiticica’s career so acutely engaged. Which colour. What is particular about Oiticica’s move ‘beyond’ painting is
is why, a quarter of a century later, his work is so interesting to current that, unlike American contemporaries, his work emphasised how the
debates about globalisation, global versus local and the ghost of that spectator could become a participant in his adventure. For while ‘hard-
old idea, universalism. edged’ American abstraction veered towards objecthood, through
Colour, at the outset, was everything. In his journal of 1960, emphasising the object-nature of the canvas (in the work of painters
Oiticica writes, ‘Any attempt to endow painting with a naturalistic such as Frank Stella), Oiticica was exploding the flat surface of the
sense of colour (diluted in a thousand hues) only diminishes it… painting into an all-enveloping constellation of planes, as in his Bilateral
The preferences that painters have for colours of high, pure chroma, Equali (1959) or the varying installations of the Grand Nucleus (1960–
stems precisely from this need to escape the relativity of things, for 6). And in his series of Spatial Reliefs of 1960, hanging constructions
colour rarely exists as high chroma in nature.’ Oiticica’s prodigious of interlocking painted wooden planes, Oiticica elaborated how colour
development happened in the context of the Brazilian concrete and might evolve as something in time and space: subtly changing tones
neo-concrete avant-garde groups, influenced by the more rational, and hues angle against each other, as light, shadow and the viewer’s
geometric traditions of European abstraction. Part of the Rio-based position modulate those tones further – colour that lives within its own
Grupo Frente during the mid-1950s, Oiticica opted for a strict geometric logic (from one tone to another), and within the logic of the space it
but richly coloured abstraction that is undermined by a sense of inhabits. As Oiticica would write in 1960, ‘When colour is no longer
composition still resolutely pictorial. For Oiticica and others of the neo- submitted to the rectangle, nor to any representation of this rectangle,
concrete movements, ‘contentless pictorial thinking’ was something to it tends to “embody” itself; it becomes temporal, it creates its own
be overcome and got beyond. By abandoning an idea of abstraction structure, and the work then becomes the “body of colour”.’
that was based solely in a sense of optical contemplation, Oiticica This embodiment was to become more pronounced, and
would open pure colour into the four dimensions of physical space and increasingly Oiticica’s preoccupation with the spatial and temporal
temporal continuity; colour was to be ‘set free’. aspect of colour’s experience pushed his work into a paradoxical
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