Helio Oiticica was a Brazilian artist born in 1937. He is arguably one of the most innovative creators of the second half of the 20th century. Oiticica, whose untimely death in 1980, tragically cut short his remarkable artistic production, will finally be having a major retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh later this year that will then travel to Whitney Museum of American Art and The Art Institute of Chicago.

The artist produced a body of work that evinces a myriad of conceptual approaches, styles and techniques of limitless originality and experimentation. The artists work, Metaesquema (1958), belongs to an early and pivotal series of gouaches that the artist created between 1957 and 1958. This phenomenal series not only allows the viewer an insight into the artist’s uniquely creative oeuvre, it also exemplifies his extraordinary contribution to the world of contemporary art.

Oiticica’s background was an unconventional one at many levels, starting with his apprenticeship in 1954 to the Rio de Janeiro based Concrete artist, Ivan Serpa, who fervently advocated abstract art and with whom Oiticica developed a very close friendship.

Serpa’s unorthodox pedagogical approach focused on his students achieving a “language of their own, genuine in comparison to others and to the past; one that might become a language of the future” as aptly stated by Serpa himself (M.C. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica – The Body of Colour, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2007, p. 35). This included encouraging his students not only to study of the nature of color in depth, but also to experiment with textures and techniques in order to create their own visual language.

Oiticica himself was never interested in a traditional career in art; rather, he had quite a radical position whereby he rarely worked with dealers or sold his work, as he believed that the “function of art should be in an increasingly reified world.” (M.C. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica – The Body of Colour, p. 35).

It’s essential to understand that in the years that followed his indoctrination within Brazil’s art scene, Oiticica was working as a visual artist within a radically challenging political situation in Brazil, living under the authoritarian and violent military regime of 1964-1985. Instead of making political oppression the explicit subject of his art, Oiticica conceived ways of making art that implicitly conveyed his opinions by incorporating the direct participation of audiences, thus injecting the element of subjectivity into his art.

Despite this unconventional approach to art, one must not forget that Oiticica was a consummate master of material. The craftsmanship of his works is meticulous and rigorously planned, and his execution of materials and techniques is extremely sophisticated. Furthermore, one of the fundamental aspects of his body of work was his lifelong preoccupation with the function of color. He believed that color has its own independent spatial and temporal dimensions, such that color could be “liberated into space,” metamorphosing into its own body, thus going beyond pictorial representation.

This novel theoretical approach and chromatic experience informed the creation of the large series of Metaesquemas. He reduced the colors to a few tones, breaking them up into irregular shaped, isolated modules within a grid, thus inserting the element of unpredictability. In doing this, he was ultimately deconstructing space through color. This allowed him to propose a completely new method of investigating color and space that was entirely unique to him as an artist, as well as investigating the issues posed by Concrete art.