Between 1954 and 1980, Hélio Oiticica constituted a body of work that continues to challenge boundaries. In tune with the emancipatory impulses of modernity after World War II, his innovative work broadened the understanding and practice of art, helping to engender the contemporary era. Faced with the crises and setbacks of the period, he continued committing himself to the liberation of ways of thinking, feeling and acting.
Avoiding the dispute between figurative and abstract representation still existing in Brazil in the early 1950s, and critically adhering to Concretism, he believed in art as a poetic invention with which to intervene in the world from the start. He continually sought to disentangle himself and his work from restrictive structures, whether the traditional categories of art—drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture—or art as a circumscribed, impermeable, pure sociocultural field.
In this process, he conceived works with unusual configurations and a growing demand for the participation of people, contributing to unshackle art from object restrictions and transforming it into a means for existential liberation. Essentially, more than inventing things, he wanted to achieve a state of invention, blurring the boundaries between art and life.
Oiticica’s production is a consistent totality, structured by a series of works resulting from well-defined and conceptually grounded experiments. On re-examination, this process is logical and understandable. However, this perception happened only a posteriori. While working, Oiticica dealt with principles and intuitions, but had no prior action plan. His broad interest in the world led him to incorporate unforeseen elements and chance, to follow unimagined paths. Thus, each series was a coherent but not mandatory unfolding of the previous experiments. And, from the 1960s onwards, his aesthetic restlessness kept his work in continuous transformation, delving deeper by advancing and opening action fronts that ran in parallel, in a non-linear way, intercommunicating and in dialogue with various social spheres.
Such dynamism is intrinsic to his works, which increasingly incorporated motion as former spectators were transformed into participants. His first chromatic experiments and the Metaesquemas (Metaschemes) are motionless works that people can perceive standing still, but which move them virtually and even literally. Later, although they remain static, the works demand people to move around in order to perceive them better, such as the Bilaterais (Bilaterals), Relevos Espaciais (Spatial Reliefs) and Núcleos (Nuclei), or requiring handling so that they may fully exist, like the Bólides (Bolides). Finally, Parangolés, Penetráveis (Penetrables), Ninhos (Nests) and Magic Squares are series in which the works only truly exist with the interaction of people.
New types of works demanded new names. Adapted terms, appropriated or specially created for the series, objectively descriptive or poetic, distinguished his invention process. Associated with each other, things and names circumscribed an artistic universe in creation, announcing new verb-sound-visual meanings.
Among the various unusual, enlightening and thought-provoking designations, three at least make the issue of motion explicit. By naming Bólides, his works composed of box-shaped wooden structures or glass containers, with pure pigments, other materials and things that demand being handled by people, he certainly associated the saturated colorlight emanating from them to the extreme brightness of shooting stars, but also alluded to the latter’s sublime speedy space trajectory. In the Penetráveis series, the name indicates the need for action performed by people, who must enter and cross the structures configured on a human scale, deal with visual, sound and tactile stimuli, experiencing in transit the crisis of dissociation between subject and object. The corporeal movement is fundamental in Delirium Ambulatorium (Ambulatory Delirium), an experience in which the aesthetic adventure is radicalized by unleashing the invention not with created things or in programmed situations, but from encounters and events in Oiticica’s roaming through the city.
His work also allows for an unrestricted, multidirectional and independent transit, which can be accessed and read in different ways. Each series illuminates what came after, as well as what came before and was concomitant, but it also preserves its autonomy.
In this sense, the series of Metaesquemas is a key moment in Oiticica’s trajectory and work. By designating the works as schemes of schemes, he flags a moment of intense and crucial reflection on art, its elements and ways of intervening in the world.
Grandson of José Oiticica, a philologist, professor and anarchist, and son of José Oiticica Filho, an entomologist, professor and photographer, Hélio inherited from them a non-acceptance of tradition as authority, an analytical and reflexive experimentation, and the taste for the semantic resonances of words. Particularly in the Metaesquemas, it is possible to observe his analytical spirit. In a certain way, he analyzed the structure of the cultural specimens he made—works of art—in order to go beyond. A non-scientific analysis, although an artistic one, in which to examine is to reinvent painting’s language and structures of significance.
Each Metaesquema is a microcosm whose pulsation stems from the nuclei of forms, where they interact with each other and with the space they create, as well as from the tension between what happens in the central arena and on the margins. With orthogonal, oblique or curvilinear borders, the forms explore possibilities of the constructivist visual lexicon in arrangements that keep geometry in a permanent process of formation and transformation. Born together with forms, space also results from this geometrical germination. Mathematical rules and exceptions are used to configure sets, sequences and progressions, but also formal, chromatic or spatial interferences, determining relative symmetries, syncopated rhythms and restless balances that result in an overflowing dynamism, which affects the surroundings and those who experience them.
The tension between morphological elements and space indicates the interdependence between them, but also Oiticica’s understanding of form as emergence and color as impregnation, and of color-form as a way of structuring the visible field and the ambiance of life. The edges with linear grooves stimulate a very subtle variation of light and shadow that makes the work’s periphery vibrate discreetly, helping to activate the dynamics in the central field. Activating the margins is to question where art begins and ends, an issue that Oiticica continued to pursue in his work. It is not by chance that the Metaesquemas were succeeded by various three-dimensional configurations that go beyond traditional artistic categories and invite people to interact. Strictly speaking, the Metaesquemas do not have a base, top or side margins, and can be effectively or virtually rotated. Loosening the hierarchy of the traditional Western structure of visualization, undifferentiation breaks the idea of the pictorial plane as a substitute for the visual field, as well as that of the artwork as a representation of the real and as an object outside the world.
Just as Metaesquemas are not exactly paintings or drawings, Relevos Espaciais go beyond canvas and sculptures. In Oiticica’s work, form and color disengage from the past, emancipate themselves from artistic categories to become real facts. In the Relevos Espaciais, it is as if space and the color-shapes of the Metaesquemas had merged, embodied and gained autonomy to act more effectively in reality. Plane gained volume, but the material—wood in this case—was minimized, to subsidize the color in its liberating adventure. The option for pigment-saturated monochromes aims to enhance color, to intensify its presence. Impregnated in the wood, color unfolds in planar bodies that contract and distend, retracting and expanding space, absorbing and intensely reflecting light. By pulsing, they make the surroundings pulsate. Hung, virtually fluctuating, the Relevos Espaciais force people to circumnavigate them, confronting their bodies with those chromatic-geometric bodies in their spreading around the world.
In Helioframes, made with the collaboration of Brazilian filmmaker Ivan Cardoso in 1979, Oiticica made graphical interventions directly on the 35mm film. When projected, the moving images make the space throb rhythmically with red, green, blue, white and black syncopated reverberations. Deepening his aesthetic experimentation, he dematerializes even further the work of art, interfering the ambiance with color-light, affecting people’s bodily perceptions.
In some of his last interviews, Oiticica qualified everything he had done so far as a prelude to what he would still do. Today, his work continues to set in motion. It generates new works by inspiring other artists, critics and institutions. And it keeps unfolding new meanings for his work and the world.
His work has expanded globally. While alive, Oiticica moved through different cultural universes, whether in his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, or during his seasons in London and New York. HO in Motion is another moment in this trajectory, reaching Asia.
Given his cosmopolitanism, it is not surprising to find Asian references in his works and texts. In 1961, when presenting the Projeto Cães de Caça (Hunting Dogs Project), the model for a garden consisting only of constructions and no vegetation, he said: “The only element of nature in it will be the sand combed like in Japanese gardens.” Oiticica has mentioned Japanese art on other occasions, making one think of the resonances of his aesthetic economy, which reduces the elements at play to maximize the sensory experience.
And he even predicted how he would reach Asia. In 1977, expressing that he did not feel like a foreigner anywhere, Oiticica added: “Stranger somewhere? Imagine, I go to China and arrive there speaking Chinese.” Indeed, Hélio Oiticica now lands in Shanghai with a language that is not Chinese, nor particularly Brazilian. Articulating his language in a very unique way in order to speak collectively, he constituted a body of work capable of moving around the world and being at home anywhere.
