Mai-Britt Wolthers: Colors That Shelter the World¹

In their rush to establish parameters for classifying movements in art history, modernist and dogmatic readings posed a false question: the opposition between abstract and figurative art. Like all opposition-based reasoning, entrenched in static and definitive identities, this dichotomy gave rise to a raft of formalizations situated at the edges of these two opposite extremes, on the border between them, or touching on both terms simultaneously.

In Brazil, the 1950s saw the emergence of a strong trend of constructive art, reflecting a powerful modern thrust and decisively evincing the influence of international geometric abstraction. In that same period, the appropriation of abstract art was a true gateway through which Brazil entered modernity, establishing geometry as a model. But the imp...