Macaparana, Brazil, 1952

“Macaparana’s art is essentially Brazilian, although it is at the opposite pole to the Brazilianism of our modernist art, which dealt with national themes.

I say that your art is Brazilian because it stems from another aesthetic process, which began in Brazil with the introduction of concrete art in the early 1950s.

(..)

Concretism, with its geometric language, opens a new path for the Brazilian plastic arts but, at the same time, leads to an impasse that will give rise to neo-concretism. By breaking with concrete norms, neo-concretism introduces other options to constructive art, different from those pointed out by the Ulm School’s aesthetics.

The basic innovation of neo-concretism was to eliminate the painting as a basic element of pictorial language. It is violated and replaced by what the neo-concretists called non-object. Despite the originality of Macaparana’s art – whose own contribution is indisputable – it would not have been born if the neo-concretes had not fundamentally changed the role of the painting as a support for pictorial language. There, so to speak, a new language is born.

What does this new language consist of? in the fact that the painting ceases to be the place where the language of painting happens to be that language itself. For this reason, it changes shape since making art now means reinventing it, making it the object of art.

In saying this, I am evidently talking about Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro but also Macaparana, heir to this new path opened to art by Brazilian artists.

Another legacy, present in Macaparana’s work, is geometry — straight lines, rectangles, hexagons, as well as invented shapes, another geometry, which is also not confused with the abstract figure on the frame space: no, geometry, in this case, is the same work, the wooden plate with the shape that the artist gives you.

You see: I am saying that geometric art, in Brazil, carried out a revolution that, following this line, stopped painting and started inventing with colors and geometric shapes another universe, another geometry, of which Macaparana art is a remarkable example.“

Ferreira Gullar, “A New Path”, 2016