Chavantes, Brazil, 1923 —
São Paulo, Brazil, 1998

What do you mean by the word “experimental”? Vogue words like “interdisciplinary” or “multimedia”, what do they mean in art? Geraldo de Barros presents a production that is frequently addressed to such categories and teaches, reflexively, that the freedom of artistic research does not dispense with coherence and purpose, which, in his case, appears as a utopian horizon, a promise of a future captured and promoted by form.

Having started his studies in drawing and painting in the studios of Clóvis Graciano, Colette Pujol and Yoshiya Takaoka, Geraldo de Barros gradually distances himself from the production of paintings with typical expressionist accents from Grupo 15, of which he participated in the foundation in 1947 and already around from 1948, produces the series Fotoformas, whose emblematic exhibition took place in 1951, at Masp. Formed by a set of black and white photographs, sometimes with the intervention of engraving, sometimes with overlapping negatives, they question the everyday look: the world of simple things, without underlining or circumstance, unfolds in the rhythm of plans that extend and oscillate in an invitation to the translation of meanings. The pictorial power of geometric abstraction is there, in the balance between the technical and the pictorial, avoiding the pathos of photographic purism.

Geraldo de Barros announces in Fotoformas two important points of Grupo Ruptura’s concretism, whose manifesto he signed in 1952: the belief in how it causes social change through sensitivity and the emphasis on industrial processes, serialization and design as means of transmission in these ways. Dialogging with the ideas of Walter Gropius, Geraldo de Barros’ experimental vocation and the art of prototypes meet the Bauhausian project. The Unilabor (50s and 60s) and Hobjeto (60s and 70s) furniture materialize the industrial and commercial onslaught of this meeting. Especially in the case of Unilabor, it is worth remembering that social transformation through form takes place with the workers’ association towards self-management, in an exemplary association of terms: the shape of a single chair reveals, end to end, the material, the way of production and your purpose.

Interrupted by the artist’s death in 1998, the Sobras series, produced from negatives of photographs of the artist’s family, once again express Geraldo de Barros’ ability to unite ends, to blur the edges of the image and everyday and utilitarian objects , generating a device that questions the actual status of the real; not to deny it, but to constitute it.

GGS