Vista de sala de la exposición. Lygia Pape. Espacio imantado, 2011

Lygia Pape

Magnetized Space

viernes 17 junio 2011
3:42
Action
Poetry
Politics
Common
Latin América

In this conversation with Paula Pape, Lygia Pape’s daughter and head of the Lygia Pape Project, some of the characteristics of Neo-Concretism, a movement that arose in Brazil in the 1950s, are discussed as they relate to the artist’s work. Neo-Concretism was a response to the premises of Concretism, which for artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica had become a hegemonic, academic movement. Pape’s work, accordingly, provides a personal, textual and poetic interpretation of the geometry that characterises Concretism.

Another of the most notable characteristics of Lygia Pape’s opus is the requirement that it be participative. Poetry breaks away from its semantic reality and materialises, imprinting a kind of subjectivity on the artwork. This tendency or movement, presented as something clearly Brazilian, nonetheless goes beyond national borders – beyond establishing an art representative of this country – and constitutes a geometry that involves the body, a subjective art dependent on the viewer.

Along these lines, Paula Pape discusses the relationship between these Neo-Concrete artworks and the sublime, with the distinguishing characteristic that the piece is made complete by the viewer’s participation, which is essential to comprehend the work, according to her comments. By analysing this moment and type of art, it is possible to once again explore the margins of so-called modernism, taking a closer look at some reinterpretations of the excessive, anti-humanist rationalism that especially manifested itself in Brazil in the construction of the new capital Brasilia, also in the 1950s. Few countries in the world have these reference points, where the parameters of modern architecture impose themselves, like a new city imposes itself on a country, revealing the limits of all aesthetic thought and making the new old the very moment that it appears.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Norah Delgado O'Neill

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Lygia Pape

Magnetized Space

Lygia Pape, Magnetized Space. From May 25 to October 3, 2011

Paula Pape, director of the Lygia Pape Project and daughter of the artist: "There was a break with Concretism. Lygia was also something of a poet and this set her apart from other artists. Between 1959 and 1961, Lydia wrote the Livro da Criação. This work starts out flat and unfolds into three-dimensional space, ending up on the streets. It goes out onto street spaces, urban spaces, as imagined by people. The Neo-Concrete movement followed the Concretist movement, which lasted from 1953/54 to 1956.


At its heart was a rigidity of forms, a rigidity of thought, because they only wanted to do one thing. But artists like Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Franz Weissmann, Ivan Serpa and others did not want to follow this rigid thinking, concrete poetry, or concrete art. There was nothing left to explore. Neo-Concretism – or new Concretism – was a new way of seeing things, primarily found in Brazil. It was a particularly Brazilian movement, formed mainly by Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.


The movement even predates Ferreira Gullar’s manifesto. Even before this, artists were starting to produce new things. It was rapidly expanding when the Modern Museum of Art opened in Rio de Janeiro. A new process was beginning in Brazil. But it was not a Brazilian art. It was, rather, an individual art. Starting with Kant’s philosophy, they reached the sublime. But the sublime does not only consist of ‘sublimating’ a work of art, looking at it and feeling it. To sublimate this work in the Neo-Concrete movement, you must participate in it. Lygia Pape perceived this clearly in artists: “for this sublimation to take place, to feel that this work could transform you, you have to participate in it.”