Cor, Plano: Suspensão

Luciano Figueiredo

From Nov 14 2014 to Feb 13 2015

The fourth solo exhibition of Luciano Figueiredo, Cor, Plano: Suspensão  (Color, Plan: Suspension), featuring new paintings by the artist who, since the 80s, has started-off from a graphic thought to create works that continue to spark Brazilian constructivism and reinvent it in his contemporary production. The set of paintings also comes with a critical text by Felipe Scovino, Art Critic, Curator and Professor. 

In his new series, which bears the same name of the exhibition, the artist presents acrylic paintings on canvas using shades of primary colors, pinks, greens and grays, in addition to black and white. On them, he spreads shredded paper, which is so small that its origin may go unnoticed to those who do not know the recurrence of newspaper in his artistic path. This material, laden of representations of the world, in small parts becomes ethereal and on rectangular and triangular shapes of color becomes suspended, while creating textured geometric modules. The chromatic fields of the paintings are translucent or opaque; those that tend to transparency refer to fields of light and allow the visualization of overlapping planes and lines that create tones and shapes, and interrelate with fields of solid color and empty spaces of the canvas itself. Canvases that are also rectangular-shaped. This interplay between geometric figures and voids is called planar dynamics by the artist. He is interested in the contrast between light and shadow, opacity and transparency, and in the ability to reveal and dissolve shapes. These rhythmic forms are in apparent motion, like the viewer’s gaze when discovering how they are formed. Delicacy is evident in this formal work, based on balance and composition. 

The career of Luciano Figueiredo shows the experimental character and consistency of his work. In 2004, in the series Dioramas and Muxarabiês, the artist presented paintings on wood, showing the close collaboration of graphic design and pictorial knowledge (painting) in his production. The transparencies in these works reveal their physical structure, their organic origin, in addition to the overlapping layers of liquid paint, while newspaper makes its presence through the diagrammatic structure of the forms on the canvas. In 2008, he presented two kinds of paintings in the exhibition Tercetos: in the first one, wood and glass boxes incorporate paintings on canvas, while in the second, non-rectangular configurations of screen layers hold paintings and also serigraphs of newspaper stripes, which function as lines. In both, the artist used a reduced range of saturated colors without strong chromatic oppositions, as in his usual style. In the series Espaço-Laço (Space-Loop) from 2011, he exhibited a three-dimensional project with works made of folded, twisted and overlapped papers and canvas that suggest movements such as flipping through a newspaper, and obtained a kind of organic space reduction. All these elements have the same status in the universe of unforced balance featured by the work of Luciano.

 

About the artist

Luciano Figueiredo was born in Fortaleza in 1948. Figueiredo started painting in the 1960s with Adams Firnekaes, a teacher from the Bauhaus, transiting between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro throughout his formation period. While in London, between 1972 and 1978, Figueiredo carried out studies in Art History and English Literature. During that same period, he began his research using newspaper prints, following his visual poems made with cutout words, colour stains, and British tabloids. His investigation led, since 1975, to the construction of three-dimensional objects with collages, wire meshes, and monochromatic reliefs, represented in exhibitions held in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo from 1984 onwards. Figueiredo asserted himself as an exponent of the Brazilian counterculture movement in the 1970s through the production of music performances’ scenography, graphic design projects, and thanks to his participation in the historic publication Navilouca.

Luciano Figueiredo creates various possibilities of perception, where his work is distinguished by its experimental, interdisciplinary character. Currently, the artist develops completely planar paintings, in which he constructs and overlaps layers of colours applied directly on wood and canvas, inviting a mood of pure contemplation from the viewer, in the their own individual time. Today, Luciano Figueiredo lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

 

Painting and invention | Felipe Scovino

The new series of works by Luciano Figueiredo - Color, plan: suspension, was constructed through the prism of invention, which could even be a phenomenon featuring his career. By limiting as much as possible shapes and colors and by perfecting them, he reinvents a tradition that is cheered by Brazilian art:  the one of constructive languages. We should clarify that the way he dominates this parsimony does not mean that his repertoire is scarce. It is exactly the opposite. His work comes almost always from the crossing of plans, and exploits the generation of space by matching plan and void. This void is not expressed as nothing, or as a space which would lack meaning, value or shape, but as something powerful; meanwhile, it is as if it were necessary, almost critical for him, that this idea be symbolically illustrated by means of a cut or opening. In this sense, his work opens us up endless windows, and enables us to perceive a space which has always been there, but which had not been noticed before. A space that is continuously being constructed by the rearrangement of shapes, and by the contrast between fullness and emptiness, light and shadow, transparency and opacity, plans overlay and a wide range of shades. 

The painter applies a new method to his practice when creating these cuts and windows in this series: shredded paper. Anointed with a small amount of glue and sprinkled on the screens, shredded paper creates an illusionist situation: it forms squares, rectangles or other geometric shapes that create a dialogue and a dynamics with the geometry of acrylic paint. 

Figueiredo does not only create new conditions for painting, but also defines the artist (painter) as someone who endlessly searches the invention or manufacture of spaces as a leading motivation. Since the 1970s, he has been using newspaper as an element of questioning and color and space construction, as in Chiaroscuro Sky (1977), in which he also emphasized the dialogue between poetry and painting, thus expressing language as an element of pictorial construction; or also in the series Relevos (1980), in which the space of newspaper sheets and their diagramming become elements that capture the painter´s thought. The title of the 1977 book reminds us that the opposition between light and shade is a widely-used device in his series of works of 2014 as a method for us to understand not only his modular construction, but also the way those forms are continually made and unmade inside the plan. The series Diorama (c. 2001) anticipates many issues that are being developed now. In those works, newspaper was cut into strips and glued to the screen, accumulating in certain parts of that screen, thus condensing a geometric game with the screen and with the subsequent applying of acrylic in the void spaces. In other cases, this game of shapes was created by three velaturas, made of those strips, acrylic paint and whole newspaper sheets. We cannot forget the importance of Figueiredo´s work in the history of design, and therefore how paper and word are his assiduous companions. 

This quick overview shows the sense of coherence and experimentation that features his work. I dare to say that, in this new series, we realize the phenomenon that also envolves the artist: the way these objects that are created by chromatic fields are crossed by light, or are pure color-light. They are “objects” that are characterized by porosity and delicacy. At times, they seem so light that we have the impression they crumble. Furthermore, this characteristic – an object which is filled by or traversed by light – does not only highlight the velaturas of the painting, but a new idea is substantially created – the one that those shapes do not suffice in that space (screen) on which they appear to our eyes. There is a kind of continuity, of a virtual movement as a continuous unfolding. These shapes are significantly in transit, since they overlay each other magically, and build spaces that are constantly being discovered by the multidirectional look of the viewer. His paintings do not induce us to look to their center, but to patiently discover the way these modules are successively formed and destroyed. Because of the relationship between full and empty, the geometric shapes are concomitantly back and forth, they advance and retreat, simulating different positions for the spectator. Figure and background cannot be discerned, and are in constant alternation. When the viewer moves in front of these works, the background breaks the color line in a way that it is seen as a series of small dots floating in space.  

There is a temporary stability in these works, because everything is relative and tends to move. Lines are generating elements of shapes, which, in turn, reveal themselves as transparencies, expanding the visual field and showing themselves basically as a vibration of light and space. 

Reflecting on how Figueiredo works with color, shredded paper makes it acquire texture and volume. Color gradually obtains a spatial condition - that is, its planar condition does not matter anymore to it – and it dialogues intensely with which is operated by the shapes and lines. Figueiredo´s work delivers us a moment which reflects something that is constantly happening and which will never be completed. It is an expectation regarding the uncertainty about where these forms follow to. It is curious to notice that, sometimes, color seems to escape and to go beyond the possibility of being held by a merely frontal perspective. Color spreads to the sides, showing kinks, leaks, rotations and movements that do not stop happening. The restlessness and invention of this artist is summarized in his ability to intelligently operate light, color and movement as a system that engenders spaces, simulating spatial potentialities and turning our certainties into doubt. And this is not little at a time of shortage of trials, in which the idea of art is intertwined with the one of commodity.

 

Felipe Scovino is a professor at Escola de Belas-Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He also works as an art critic and curator.