Uberlândia, Brazil, 1926 —
São Paulo, Brazil, 1988

The language of constructivism became part of Wyllis de Castro’s production around 1953, when the artist already lived in São Paulo and developed graphic design projects and concrete poems. In 1957, he produced oil paintings on canvas in which a geometric figure acts as a module that will be repeated and rotated on the canvas, forming hollow spaces that suggest volume and movement. In 1959, living in Rio de Janeiro, he joined the artists of the Neoconcreto Group and developed his Active Objects. In these paintings on canvas on wood, the support can be a cube or a board, installed orthogonally to the wall and thus invading the three-dimensional space. The observer is challenged by the dynamism obtained with few colors, two or three, that alternate in monochromatic and interrupted bands, and that continue, displaced, in a band of another color. The length and thickness of each of the monochromatic areas are defined according to the length and thickness of the piece, but this geometric precision, of well-defined proportion between parts and the whole, far from stiffening the shape, produces both visual and body movement the observer, who is compelled to alternate between the two sides of the work to apprehend it. The color in the Active Object displaces, falls, disengages, and thus violates the rigidity with minimal operation. Wyllis de Castro is also economical in the quantity of pieces he produces, presenting the essentials of his research in a few works. The Active Objects were produced between 1959 and 1962, and the next series of works will be made public in the early 1970s, with the same rigor and economy of means. In Pluriobjetos, wood and metal continue the game of displacing parts and elegant affirmation of what is out of order and simultaneously seduces by balance.