“The body of colour,” is a text that encompasses the work of Latin American Artist Helio Oiticia.
Oiticia is a Brazilian painter, sculptor and performance artist. He is influenced by concrete art and De Stijl. The book was complied by three authors, Mari Ramirez and Luciano Figeriredo being the main contributors. The author Ramirez is the Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Figueiredo is the Director of the Hélio Oiticia centre in Rio de Janeiro. The Authors background as Curator and Director give them excellent insights into the way artists work. Figueiredo as the Director of the center to Oiticia would have access to a lot of information regarding the artist’s style. The text was published in 2007, it states on Amazon.com that the text draws on new research including previously unseen works and that it is the most extensive publication on the Artist to date (14-4-2010).
Within the range of text we have read (pages 205- 207) the ideas that interested me most were the relationships between Music and Space. It states in the article “They posses more of an architectural relationship, achieved in the large paintings.. Here, the predominant relationship is a musical one, yet it is not because, as in music, the pieces create counterpoint..for musicality is not lent to the work but born from its essence.” (207) This statement is focused on the work below, it depicts plans of wood painted orange that hover in real space through the use of fishing line allowing the plans to hover in real space as if they were part of a musical score. Carla Gottlieb discusses in ‘Movement in Painting’ how the Synthetic Cubists ‘decomposed an object into a number of sections which are spread out like cards in a deck.. This generates movement in the image because of the need for wholeness and the simplicity of shapes force the viewer to observe separate portions into the entity from which they have sprung.’(30) She goes on to talk about the important of Rhythm, (which is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as having a recurrence of related elements), through the use of similar shapes and colours to tie the composition together rhythmically.
Oiticia reduces the subject to the bare essentials, the colour orange, the vertical and horizontal. The effect created is a sense of rhythm represented through an architectural landscape. The viewer’s relationship with the work is an important one. He places the work in a manner that encourages you to move around the painting. This viewer interaction is an important part of the work in its relationship to music. As a viewer when you move around the artwork changes, there is a shift in the placement of the planes and you move around and create different spaces within the painted landscape.Oiticica combined colour with rhythm, music, and performance to stimulate visual and tactile sensations, drawing in and involving his audience. Oiticia describes his work as ‘nonobject’, which is closely linked to the term nonobjective, meaning no subject is involved with the artwork. However through the way the artist has created floating panels of solid colour the work has a sense a dynamism and time by placing the colour planes in an a style that is similar to a way one would see a musical score with a constant style but repeated melody. He develops variation and order through the use of repeated motifs.
His work displays what Gottlieb states that a good painting should show, ‘ to guide the eye over every detail, from dominant theme to peripheral motifs’. Oiticia aim is to deconstruct the traditional elements of painting – colour and the two-dimensional plane that supports it, reconfiguring them in new, innovative forms, to liberate colour into space. His reference to music as the artist has suggested, is a subtle one. As an abstract painter one aims to make references to representational objects but in a more open-ended way. Abstraction can often show less but can reference and mean more.
Oiticia aims to deconstruct the image to the traditional elements of a painting, He is successful In doing this. But the reference to music made me think, as viewers don’t we always link images together with past memories and experiences? The artist Piet Mondrian insinuated movement and jazz with this work ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’, the reference to place, being New York’s Broadway, along with the grid reference to the way the city was planned, and Boogie Woogie referencing Mondrian’s love of jazz and the suggestion of movement in the artwork. Oiticia shows similar references with his placement of planes in space.
Ramirez, Mari, ed. The Body of Colour. U.K.: Tate, 2007. Print.
Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color [Paperback]. Amazon.com. Web. 14 Apr. 2010
Gottlieb, Carla. "Movement in Painting." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17.1 (1958): 22-33. Web.
"Rhythm." Web. 10 May 2010. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhythm
Images from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_Boogie_Woogie accessed: 10-5-2010
http://bezerraguimaraes.blogspot.com/2009/10/helio-oiticica.html: 10-5-2010
Hey Emma
ReplyDeleteI liked your entry - especially the bits where you talk about a connection between painting, music and past experiences. I like the idea of this connection but for me its more in relation to time than movement in space. The flow in time that music produces has similarities to the experience of time you can sometimes have when viewing a painting. But I think that the paintings that best make this experience possible are those that don't easily link into past memories or experiences.
Hi Emma,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to consider Helio Oiticica's Spatial Reliefs in terms of their musicality. For me to this aspect becomes more of a trace, or essence in his work rather than a defining element and perhaps particularly applies to Grand Nucleus, begun at the same time as the Spatial Reliefs, and his later performance based works. I tend to think of Oiticica's works as lyrical, offering the viewer a harmonious contemplation space on which to project their own understanding and experience.
I’m interested in the term ‘non-object’ - which you state is related to ‘non-objective’ and used by Oiticia to describe his work in terms of it being non-representational. The lack of any obvious representation indeed opens the work to more diverse interpretation. The viewer is able to explore the landscape of his paintings without a guidebook; thus the opportunity arises for us to end up in unchartered territory. Non-objective literally means subjective, that which ‘exists in the mind of the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought’. So abstract art is definitely a platform or a diving board for this type of thinking to occur.
ReplyDeleteThanks for making the link between Oiticicas abstract architectural sculptures and Mondrians "Broadway Boogie Woogie". To me Oiticicas work seems to be a further development in regards to musicality. In addition to a rhythmic representation it invites the viewer to move to it resulting in a complex and beautiful dance with nonobject art.
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