FEATURE HELIO OITICICA
left: Caetano Veloso, 1968, wearing P04 Parangolé Cape 01, 1964
above: Hélio Oiticica, c. 1965, with Bólides and Parangolés in his home-
studio, Rua Engenhero Duarte, Rio de Janeiro.
AHO/ PHO, RJ. All photos © Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

encounter with ordinary objects, transformed by their absorption by aesthetic and subjective freedom, the politics of life could not help but
high, vibrant colour. Neither sculptures nor readymades, Oiticica’s articulate themselves in his work. His Parangolés, banners and capes
Bólides of the mid-1960s are best described as ‘coloured objects to of multicoloured cloth to be worn and danced with, are ripe with this
be handled’. Complex interactions between hues take place in hinged kind of subversion, and as artworks based in free and open public
and sliding boxes, or in modified jars full of pigment. Imbued with participation, Oiticica projected them into the poor urban context
extraordinary colour, Oiticica’s Bólides bring colour back to life and of the favelas as much as into the happenings and cultural events
make everyday things the bearers of a more complex contemplation that increasingly contested the repression; they couldn’t help but be
of colour’s ever-changing identity. Crucially, what takes them beyond political. ‘Individual and collective vitality’, Oiticica wrote in 1966, ‘will be
sculpture is the way they can be transformed by the person interacting the raising up of something solid and real despite underdevelopment
with them, who is no longer a viewer but an active participant in and chaos… [O]nly from the furious act of overthrowing can we hope
their existence. to erect something palpable and worthwhile: our reality.’
Such a course of development has a lot to do with how Oiticica’s later work, in which he increasingly integrated references
Oiticica’s work is ingrained with the sensibility of life in Brazil, a reality to contemporary culture into his non-representational projects, will form
that would mark the artist later on. Prospering in the postwar boom of the focus of a future retrospective. The Body of Colour, however, opens
the 1950s, Brazil’s intelligentsia could look to the cosmopolitan culture a new perspective on Oiticica’s singular aesthetic project, and on the
of Modernism with enthusiasm, in a country nevertheless marked by way in which the universalising aspirations at the heart of abstraction
harsh social divisions and poverty. But in 1964 this period came to a could be renewed and transformed, paradoxically, by being remade in
sudden end, as the government was overthrown by the US-backed the local circumstances of a different society. Ignoring the confines of
military coup, an event that inaugurated two decades of political and the gallery, but deeply committed to art, Oiticica’s work was art made
cultural repression. The destruction of an ideal of internationalism by out of life, as much as art put into it.
the reality of locally imposed brutality changed the backdrop against
which Oiticica’s work took shape. Siding with the movements of popular
cultural dissent during the late 1960s, Oiticica continued his adventures Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour will be on show at Tate Modern,
in colour, but for an artist deeply committed to an understanding of London, from 6 June to 23 September
ARTREVIEW seven.lintwo.lin
p 68-72 Oiticica AR May07.indd 6 3/4/07 10:13:36
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