Coloured Poetics

Hélio Oiticica’s Magic Square No.5 - De Luxe

Nestled in the paradisiacal gardens of the Museu do Açude, Rio de Janeiro,

Hélio Oiticica’s Magic Square No.5 - De Luxe confronts the softened senses

like an enormous, joyful monolith. Impossibly bright rectangular walls, hollow

panels stretched over with wire and others perforated with cut-out squares

constitute this irregular, partially open cube-like structure. One’s immediate

impression is surprise at the magnificent colours- magenta, primary red,

canary yellow, whites and blues- and its unquestionable presence. Magnetic,

it draws you to its walls, where you are dwarfed by the carefully placed

panels. It feels like a house of our wildest, postmodern dreams, and has the

dimensions of one. Despite its daunting size, the work is unequivocally tactile,

and has a live energy that is fed by the constant re-invention of the structure,

as the fierce tropical sun toys with its colours. At midday, the sun hits a blue

Perspex panel, and sends a quivering square of violet into the heart of the

cube.

This sensual structure is perfectly balanced in tension by a live dialogue

between colour, structure and spectator. What it proposes for architecture is

an exciting exploration into the purpose of the architectural object, a study into

colour as form, and a radical statement as to the role of architectural space in

relation to the inhabitant. The question fundamental to these explorations lies

in Oiticica’s radical belief in non-objectivity formulated in the late 1950’s

(Oiticicia declared his works to be ‘non-objects’ in 1959) 1 and begs the

question of how we can experience an architectural structure as a non-object.

How do we experience this joyful monolith as it stands in our way?

The energetic presence and magnetism of Magic Square No.5 is true to Hélio

Oiticica’s neo-concrete artistic practise, a movement he founded alongside

other Brazilian greats Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape in Rio de Janeiro in the

1960’s. Neo-concretism proposed that art should be non-representational and

non-objective, focussing on the experience of the spectator, rather than the

art object. Oiticica’s best known works involve the centrality of the spectator

and focus on the transformative experiences of those that interact with his

1In1959Oiticicadeclaredhisworkstobe‘non‐objects’followingtheconceptformulatedbycriticFerreiraGullar.

work, such as in the Bolides and Penetrables series, of which Magic Square

No.5 is one. In the Bolides (translated as ‘Fireballs’)2 series, the artist creates

various objects, atmospheres or environments that are to be entered into;

proposing, as critic Guy Brett has suggested, other realities, or ‘another way

of being in the world’3. His large body of Penetrable sculptures are made for

the spectator to enter bodily and experience kinaesthetically. In both cases,

the artist creates ‘bodies’ or proposals with which the spectator interacts,

creating energy in the ‘communication spaces’ between the two. It is in these

spaces between bodies that transformational energy is created, proposing

alternative relationships between all things, or, as metaphorically expressed

by the artist, ‘new possibilities for walking between places’4. Oiticica’s later

work includes architectural structures and maquettes of exquisite sculptural

precision, which combine a study of colour as a key element of this

exploration of penetrability and total spectator interaction.

Therefore the forested, tropical idyll in which Magic Square No. 5 sits must not

lull us into a false sense of the work being a purely aesthetic gesture, for

although it is a boldly beautiful statement, it’s also tense, searching and

rebellious. The cicadas that cry and screech in rhythmic waves in the forest

portent this unease. Oiticica himself said, ‘the so-called garden aesthetic is a

plague that must end’5, and was always highly suspicious of the designated

art or museum space, asserting the ‘impossibility of experiences in galleries

and museums’ and, whilst Magic Square No.5 is visually tantalising we must

also acknowledge its ability to ‘un-do’6 itself and its surroundings. As curator

Marcio Doctors asserts that Oiticica’s work has a cunning habit of ‘fusing in

order to diffuse’ 7 , and in its role as a Penetrable it invites kinaesthetic

interaction, and in doing so shrugs off its own objectivity in favour of

centralising the spectator experience.

2TranslatedbyGuyBrettinhisessay‘HélioOiticica:TheExperimentalExerciseofLiberty’inCarnivalofPerception:SelectedWritingsonArtbyGuyBrett(Iniva,London,2004)3GuyBrettCarnivalofPerception:SelectedWritingsonArt(Iniva,London,2004)p.644H.OiticicaTheSensesPointingTowardsaNewTransformationp.55H.Oiticica‘Programaambiental’(1966)6MarcioDoctors,publishedintheexhibitioncatalogue‘MuseudoAçudeSpaceforPermanentCollections(MuseudoAçude,Brazil,2000)p.287MarcioDoctors,asabove

In this way this work is a fusion of two great preoccupations of the artist

throughout his lifetime - that of continual experimentation into the living

experience of the spectator, and his exquisite understanding of form. Here,

the search for the ‘continuing revitalisation of imagination’ and ‘invention-play’, 8which happen in the imagination and lived experience of the spectator, can

only happen within this joyful, masterful structure, which Guy Brett describes

as a ‘gesture of extreme simplicity…in its play with opposites and ambiguities

in its pursuit of energy’ (p.69). What is clear is that this ‘energy’ noted by Brett

happens within the communication spaces between colour, structure, the

body of the work and the body of the spectator. Space becomes ‘diffused’, as

David Sperling notes, ‘space is no longer referred to by its geometric

characteristics, but…as a surrounding where action is processed’9. This idea

is key to our understanding of the work as a non-object, for instead of being

experienced as an objective structural reality, the work is experienced as the

locus of our living actions. As Lygia Clark asserts, ‘the action is not making,

but rather living in terms of architecture’10. What Magic Square No.5 proposes

for architecture is that it is should create loci for human action, or as Clark

writes, ‘a vehicle for the experience of the body’; structures that seek to not

inform us about their own physicality but rather about our own. We interact

within the structural body to reconfigure our lived experiences, which the artist

poetically calls ‘vivências’11, in our own.

In the case of ‘Magic Square 5’, colour plays an important role in the making

of this transformational space. Oiticica proposes a system in which form is not

experienced as object, but rather where we experience colour as form. Here,

colour creates form in an active process of creation; for whatever performative

possibilities the artist believed colour to have, he also believed it to be a

8H.OiticicaquotedinCarnivalofPerception:SelectedWritingsonArtbyGuyBrett(Iniva,London,2004)p.689DavidSperlingin‘Body+Art=Architecture:PropositionsbyHélioOiticicaandLygiaClark’inLooseThreads:TheArtofHélioOiticica(Perspectiva,Brazil,2008)p.13710LygiaClarkquotedin‘Body+Art=Architecture:PropositionsbyHélioOiticicaandLygiaClark’byDavidSperlinginLooseThreads:TheArtofHélioOiticica(Perspectiva,Brazil,2008)11WordoftenusedbyLygiaClarkandH.Oiticicatomean‘life‐experiences’

creative force in the most literal sense. Oiticica used colour as the building

block on which to inform his structural queries, as Brett notes ‘It was through

colour that Hélio explored all the basic structural questions, beginning with the

pictorial order and expanding outwards to his experience of space and time’

(p.54). Magic Square No. 5, a late work, has these enquiries as a central

theme. Colour in this sense is not representational, and it certainly isn’t

appropriate to talk of Oiticica seeking some form of balance or ‘harmony’ in

the colours he uses. However, what is undeniable is that the dialogue

between the colours, each proposing a structural reality, contributes to create

the energy that makes the experience of being inside the work electrifying and

transformational. It becomes instinctively clear that each colour can be, of

itself and in an active sense, ironic, witty, defiant or controversial. Simply,

colour is a poetic force that can be used not only to create structure but as an

immaterial transformational tool.

As you enter the square from the entrance to the forest, you pass an

extraordinary red panel, only for another perpendicular wall of deep,

unapologetic pink, to leap out at you. Spectators laugh or exclaim as they

come across this unexpected statement, wittily hidden behind the primary red.

What creates this wit and surprise is that our brains do not expect to see this

colour in this context. This pink is simply ‘unthinkable’ next to red. Another

instance is an enormous canary-yellow wall, perforated with square cut-outs

that is somehow too sensual, too reminiscent of food, and our senses blend

uncomfortably to produce water in the mouth and at the same time a desire to

look away. With these gestures, Oiticica bypasses our pre-conceived notions

of representational colour and transforms our experience of colour into a real

live experience, or ‘vivência’, which recalibrates our seeing bodies and makes

the experience of being inside the work really live. The monumental, witty and

yet ephemeral structure acts not only as a carefully crafted object but, more

crucially, as an experience, through and within which we –simply- live, in the

most present sense. Colour bridges the gap between structural form and our

embodied spirit, or, as curator Marcio Doctors puts it, ‘colour is the passage

between matter to spirit’ (exhib catalogue p.29).

In this way, colour plays an important role in the architectural function (and

construction) of the work and contributes to its tense, contained energy. This

tension continually recreates itself, as spectators pass through and the sun

hits the materials, transforming them continually. The periodical appearance

of the ephemeral ‘magic square’ of violet light, that seems to constitute the

living, beating heart of the work, is the constant reminder of this piece’s

purpose. By putting this ephemeral square of colour at the centre of the piece,

the artist asserts that colour is the essential structure of the work. It could also

be proposed that this blue ‘ghost’ constitutes the ‘vivência’ of the structure

itself as a ‘body’ of colour. Similarly, he who enters and leaves the structure

briefly brings their bodies, their lived experience, into the structure. It is in

these moments of experience, interrogation and interaction with the spectator

that the sculpture assumes its power, within the spectator himself. Magic

Square No.5 achieves the purpose of the transformational architectural

structure as seen by Lygia Clark, who writes ‘It is a poetic shelter where

inhabiting is equivalent to communicating’. 12 The coloured poetics of this

12LygiaClark‘1969:OCorpoéaCasa’quotedin‘Body+Art=Architecture:PropositionsbyHélioOiticicaandLygiaClark’inLooseThreads:TheArtofHélioOiticica(Perspectiva,Brazil,2008)p.143

sculpture whisper in the communication spaces between structure and

spectator and are altered, transformed, reconfigured and re-made in us.