Geraldo de Barros (Chavantes, SP, 1923 - São Paulo, SP, 1998). Photographer, painter, engraver, graphic artist, furniture designer and draftsman. An exponent of experimental photography, his trajectory goes through various forms of visual expression and claims the social role of art.
He studied drawing and painting, starting in 1945, in the studios of painters Clóvis Graciano (1907-1988), Colette Pujol (1913-1999) and the Japanese Yoshiya Takaoka (1909-1978). In 1946, he took his first pictures with a camera he had built himself, photographing soccer games on the outskirts of São Paulo. Also during this period, he experimented with interferences on the negative, such as cutting, drawing, painting, perforating, solarizing and superimposing images.
In 1947, he founded Grupo 15, a studio set up in the center of the city, where he built a photographic laboratory. The group is composed of 15 painters, most of Japanese origin. At first, his painting is close to expressionist tendencies. During this period he came into contact with reproductions of works by the Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1914), which led him to become interested in the Bauhaus school and industrial design.
In the same year he joined Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), the main center of modern Brazilian photography. With Hungarian photographer Thomaz Farkas (1924-2011), and photographers German Lorca (1922) and José Yalenti (1895-1967), he questions the amateur and academic pictorialist tradition of photography in Brazil, based on classical compositional rules. His experiment investigates the limits of the traditional photographic process by making interventions directly on the negative, multiple exposures of the same film, superimpositions, montages and cuts that question the rectangular format of photography.
In 1948, through the critic Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981), he learned about Gestalt Theorie [Theory of Form]. In 1949, with Farkas, he organized the laboratory and photography courses at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (Masp). From then on, his activity approached formal formats and his interest stopped at rhythms and planes, which often projected into space beyond the frame. The following year, he held, at Masp, the anthological exhibition Fotoformas, whose title is a reference to Gestalt. The show explores the complete fusion between engraving, drawing and photography, inaugurating abstraction in Brazilian photography.
In 1951, with a scholarship from the French government, he went to Paris, where he studied lithography at the École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and printmaking at the studio of English painter Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988). He attended the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, Germany, where he studied graphic arts with the German designer Otl Aicher (1922) and met the Swiss graphic designer Max Bill (1908-1994), at the time one of the leading theoreticians of concrete art. This meeting is important for the development of this school in Brazil.
In the same year, he was awarded the acquisition prize at the 1st Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. He returned to São Paulo in 1952 and took part in the Grupo Ruptura, a milestone in the introduction of concrete art in Brazil. In contact with Gestalt theories, he seeks to establish a structural unity of the work with a rigorous will to order, regulated by mathematical principles.
In 1954, with Friar João Batista, he founded the cooperative Unilabor, a furniture factory based on workers' self-management and profit sharing. The site also reflects Barros' concern with the social role of the artist and with the possibilities of an art made to reach a wider public. The project involves a series of cultural and pedagogical actions for the families of the associates, such as film screenings, as well as the maintenance of a children's art school and a health center.
Also in 1954, he wins the contest for the poster for the 4th Centennial of São Paulo, and, with graphic designer Alexandre Wollner (1928-2018), he creates a piece for the International Film Festival. Very involved in design and somewhat distant from painting, in 1957 he founded with Wollner and designer Ruben Martins (1928-1968) Forma-Informa, a design office where he created several brands and logos.
With the end of Unilabor in 1964, he founded Hobjeto Móveis. In 1966, he joined the Grupo Rex with artist Wesley Duke Lee (1931-2010), intermedia artist Nelson Leirner (1932-2020), visual artist Carlos Fajardo (1941), painter Frederico Nasser (1945) and sculptor José Resende (1945), responsible for the first happenings to take place in São Paulo. From the middle of this decade on, his production has been approaching pop trends and the new figuration.
In the 1970s, he resumed his research with concrete art and made geometric works using Formica as a support. The procedure allows large-scale reproduction, in line with the interest in socializing art and obtaining a series based on a particular project. His works are prototypes built with few forms, an aspect that allows for perfect reproduction.
In the 1980s, he returned to photography with the series Sobras. The work resumes the research begun in the 1940s, by promoting various interferences in negatives by means of leftover photographic material.
Geraldo de Barros plays a decisive role in the introduction of concretism in Brazil. His diversified work in the field of visual arts has as common foundations experimentation, the exploration of forms and the affirmation of the social role of artistic production.
GERALDO de Barros. In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa6490/geraldo-de-barros>. Accessed on: 14 Jun. 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7