Waldemar Cordeiro | Geometria Intuitiva

Waldemar Cordeiro was one of the main agents in the history of Brazilian art, a key figure for the transition of modern to contemporaneity art, being a forerunner of artistic movements such as Concretism and Computer Art in Brazil and worldwide, as well as an eminent landscape architect. With atemporal concepts and ideas, his entire interdisciplinary artistic production followed a coherent development, passing through phases of investigation that currently stand as milestones in the history of the visual arts in Brazil: figurativism, Concrete Art, Popcreto, and Computer Art. One of his phases which is just as important as the others but has nevertheless been little studied and still remains practically unknown to the public, is his “Intuitive Geometry” phase.

 

Situated chronologically between his Concrete Art and Popcreto phases, between 1960 and 1963, his Intuitive Geometry phase is now having its importance duly recognized, for the first time in history, at the exhibition Waldemar Cordeiro: Geometria Intuitiva [Waldemar Cordeiro: Intuitive Geometry], at Luciana Brito Galeria. This phase followed his Concrete Art phase (1950s), which for its part involved a renewal of the values of the visual arts and of the creative process following an appeal to constructivist esthetics and working with the primary colors (yellow, red and blue) and precise geometric lines. From his investigations of Concrete art, Cordeiro then advanced into his Intuitive Geometry phase, in which he maintained the same spatial organization of the canvas but abandoned the use of a ruler and compass in order to obtain freer lines and colors, combining primary colors and adding white or black, to achieve other hues. In both these investigations – Concrete Art and Intuitive Geometry – colors were combined in compositions that were organized spatially to directly reach the viewer’s innate perception.

 

According to the principles of Gestalt, the whole is more important than the parts, as the overall set of the composition is what evokes the feelings of the observer, who understands the information through levels of interpretation, beginning at the primary stage of vision and leading up through one’s individual emotions and repertoires. With highly unique boldness, in his Intuitive Geometry phase Cordeiro took these concepts – which he had previously studied through Concretism – and coupled them with a typically Brazilian coloration and an abstractionist bent. The different hues that reflect the climate and lighting proper to tropicality, such as the pinks, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, etc., were combined in his oil-on-canvas works with lines often inspired in the morphology of Brazilian plants – another of Cordeiro’s interests, as around this time he was studying plants native to Brazil’s Serra do Mar [coastal rain forest] biome. Totaling more than 30 works, as well as paintings from his Intuitive Geometry series, the show features a set of rare drawings made by Cordeiro to illustrate his botanical investigation, establishing a direct dialogue with the landscape architecture designed by Burle Marx all around the gallery’s modernist space.

 

Cordeiro dedicated his life to creating an art accessible to everyone, seeking a collective sense that aligned technology, design and landscape architecture, always linked with a social and political concern. His legacy broke paradigms and transformed the way of seeing and making art in Brazil, imparting content and objectivity to it. An aspect so far seldom considered, however, is the importance of his Intuitive Geometry phase, insofar as it dealt with concepts pertaining to a typically Brazilian visuality in abstraction, making it a pivotal milestone in the transition to contemporary art in Brazil.