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Artist who recently died at the age of 100 left a legacy in Brazilian abstract art
Within a pragmatic and methodical artistic movement such as concretism, considering deviation can be considered a courageous act. Judith Lauand: concrete deviationfrom the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, is the largest solo exhibition ever made regarding the artist who marked a unique place in Brazilian geometric art.
Judith Lauand, who left us at the age of 100 last December 9th, has her legacy presented in this exhibition in a panoramic way, with expography that presents a career open to transformations over regarding five decades. There are 124 works, including paintings and drawings, organized into sections that follow a chronological line.
Being part of Grupo Ruptura, which definitely marked the Brazilian art scene by establishing a space for geometric art in a powerful and articulated way, is already a pioneering act in itself. The fact that Judith Lauand is the only woman in this São Paulo group adds another layer to the importance of this presence in a disputed area, where women’s wrestling remains until today. Grupo Ruptura held its first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo – MAM in 1952, which is considered the starting point of concrete art in the country. Lauand was not at that first exhibition, but it was this year that she moved to São Paulo and would come into contact with the production of these artists.
One of the main gateways to abstract art in Brazil was the Bienal de São Paulo which, starting with the first edition in 1951, would bring new international trends into contact with Brazilian artists in our territory. Despite the critical debate regarding the importance of figuration or abstraction for Brazilian art, in which some intellectuals pointed to a supposed risk of abstract art mischaracterizing national production, abstractionism gained its space from the 1950s onwards.
In the second edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, in 1953, Lauand was a monitor and had contact with works by great artists such as Max Bill, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian. At the time, the artist worked with painting through an experimental figuration, characteristic of modernist trends.
The exhibition’s entrance hall presents a section of this figurative period, with portraits and free compositions. In the same room, there are works that mark the beginning of geometric experimentation in Lauand’s career, greatly impacted by this contact with abstractionist artists. Since the beginning, different materials have been used, such as tapestries, wooden boards, metal and canvas.
The exhibition has a circular format, with compartmentalized rooms in different decades. The course of the exhibition following the entrance shows the different uses of geometry or figuration in the artist’s plastic experiments. The second moment focuses on Lauand’s production in the second half of the 1950s, a moment of intensification of geometric studies, bringing a new rigor to the works – characteristic of São Paulo concretists. There is a sobriety in the use of colors and protagonism of forms, especially marked by the repetition of some elements that produce rhythm in the compositions.
In the 1960s, Lauand returned to figuration, bringing political approaches to his work. With the influence of concrete poetry, words gain space, thought of in the spatiality of the work as a discursive and pictorial element. In this period of intense political movements, which included the Civil-Military Dictatorship in Brazil and the Vietnam War, the artist developed compositions that carried political messages or female protagonism – subjects that did not necessarily separate.
A prominent example of this period is the work “Collection 318, fear of death”, produced in 1969. In this painting, Lauand places two bodies in interaction, using a reduced and vibrant palette. The phrase “Temor à morte” in the title can be seen in the work through the fragments “te”, “a” and “mor”, a set that enables a series of other associations, such as “love”. Through the language game, the artist worked on the subjectivity and problems experienced by women in society, both in private and in public life.
It is also during this period that the artist expands the range of materials that make up her work, including objects from industry. Clips and thumbtacks, for example, signal the relationship of this artistic production with an industrial-scale system. By including such objects in two-dimensional works, the artist gave them a new aesthetic value and updated their references.
Experimenting with new materials and the use of vibrant colors was an important point for Lauand who, from the 1960s onwards, would think of other ways of organizing geometry. Color then takes center stage in the painting’s composition, in which geometry is defined by chromatic scales, rather than by lines and mathematical studies. The works still show a strong concern for the order of forms in space, but are configured in a harmony of colors that complement each other to form a vivid field.
A panoramic exhibition like this one, which focuses on decades of intense artistic production, allows the public to get closer to an artist who is often seen in a scattered way. The large collection of works demonstrates the importance of the desire and courage to access new places in a field that often requires artists to follow postulates. Producing out of comfort zones can always be a risk, and Lauand’s trajectory shows that this has never stopped her. This artist’s legacy speaks not only to female artists who are daily inserted in predominantly male spaces, but to any artist who seeks a reference for experimentation.
Diogo Barros is a curator, art educator and critic, graduated in Art History, Criticism and Curatorship at PUC SP.
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