Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1937 - idem, 1980). Performance artist, painter and sculptor. His work is characterized by a strong experimentalism and inventiveness in the constant search to merge art and life. His experiments, which presuppose an active participation of the public, are, in great part, accompanied by theoretical elaborations, with the presence of texts, commentaries, and poems.
His inventiveness can be partly explained by his education. By family choice, he did not attend school in his childhood. He received a formal education from his father, the photographer José Oiticica Filho (1906-1964). In 1954, with his brother César Oiticica (1939), Hélio began to study painting with Ivan Serpa (1923-1973) at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ).
One of the artist's first works is a series of gouaches on paper, titled Metaesquemas in the 1970s. Started in 1957, this series, according to Oiticica, already presented the conflict between pictorial and extrapictorial space, foreshadowing the overcoming of painting. Thus, in 1959, the artist marked the beginning of the transition from canvas to environmental space, which occurred with Bilaterais—monochromatic plates painted with tempera or oil and suspended by nylon threads—and Relevos Espaciais, his first three-dimensional works.
In 1960 he participated in the 2nd Neo-Concrete Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro and created the first Núcleos, also known as Penetráveis—wooden plates painted in warm colors and hung from the ceiling by nylon threads. In them, both the displacement of the spectator and the movement of the plates become part of the experience. The spectator is already an active participant in Núcleos, but this participation is radicalized by the artist in 1963, in his first manipulable structures, the Bólides—containers storing pigment—, the result of a desire to give body to color and add other sensory stimuli to the visual experience.
In the late 1960s he began to collaborate with the Estação Primeira de Mangueira Samba School. He became involved with this community, and from this experience came the Parangolés, Oiticica's best known work. They are tents, banners, flags and dressing gowns that fuse elements such as color, dance, poetry and music and presuppose a collective cultural manifestation. The artist himself defines them thus: "I will henceforth call all the principles formulated here Parangolé [...]. Parangolé is anti-art par excellence; I even intend to extend the meaning of 'appropriation' to the things of the world that I come across in the streets, wastelands, fields, the ambient world at last [...]" [1].
In 1967, the issues raised with Parangolé culminated in Manifestações Ambientais, especially in the works Tropicália(1967), Apocalipopótese (1968) and Éden (1969). Tropicália, presented in the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira, at MAM/RJ, is considered the apogee of his environmental program—it is a kind of roofless labyrinth reminiscent of the architecture of the slums, and inside it features a TV set that is always on. After the composer Caetano Veloso (1942) started using the term tropicália as a title for one of his songs, several developments occurred in Brazilian popular music and culture that became known as tropicalism.
The project Éden—composed of Tendas, Bólides and Parangolés as propositions open to individual and collective participation and experiences—is presented in London, in 1969, at the Whitechapel Gallery. Considered his largest exhibition in life, it was organized by the English critic Guy Brett (1942) and nicknamed the Whitechapel Experience. With this kind of utopia of community life emerges the Crelazer proposition, linked to the creative perception of non-repressive leisure and the valuing of leisure.
In 1970, he won a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and settled in New York. He participated in the exhibition Information, held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York, where he developed the idea of Ninhos as multiplying cells linked to the growth of the community. He returns to Brazil in 1978 and participates in some collective events. In 1980, he proposed the second urban-poetic event Esquenta pr'o Carnaval, in Morro da Mangueira.
In 1981 the Hélio Oiticica Project was set up in Rio de Janeiro to preserve, analyze and publicize his work, directed by the artists Lygia Pape (1927-2004), Luciano Figueiredo (1948) and Waly Salomão (1943-2003). In 1996, the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Secretariat of Culture founded the Centro Municipal de Artes Hélio Oiticica to house the artist's entire collection and make it available to the public.
Hélio Oiticica is an essential name in Brazilian art. With his constant desire for experimentation and his concern for the environment, he constructs work that is diverse and unique, able to affect the public in any way they wish, inviting them to be part of the work, which also illustrates his belief that art and life merge. For Oiticica, the work of art is an object to be experienced, constructed, enjoyed, and that gains meaning in the relationship that man establishes with it. His art is in the world, just as the world is in his art.
Note
1. OITICICA, Hélio. Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986. p. 79.
HÉLIO Oiticica. In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa48/helio-oiticica>. Accessed on: June 25, 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7