Denying the naturalist tradition, and all expressiveness of a romantic content, constructive art glimpsed the approach of a new life, endowed with greater rigor and rationality. Universalist art, in which painting, sculpture and architecture converged on urbanism and design, fertilizing everyday life with the clarity of geometric reason and the serial logic of industrial production.
Line, color and surface, in this sense, are not abstract, but concrete elements, defining a language that gained increasing importance in Brazil from the 1950s onwards, based on stripping and formal economy. These are the values that guide the set of works presented here, bringing together the production of a wide range of constructive artists and the furniture of Estúdio Branco & Preto, based in São Paulo in the 50s.
Both in the artworks and in those of design, shown here at the home of architect and designer Jorge Zalszupin, structural clarity predominates, and a serial rhythm that is not limited to graphics, but expands in space with sophistication and delicacy.
Guilherme Wisnik