[4] The Neo-Concrete art movement arose when Grupo Frente realized that Concretism was “naïve and somewhat colonialist” and an “overly rational conception of abstract structure.”[5] In 1960, Hélio Oiticica joined the Neo-Concrete group, and his series of red and yellow painted hanging wood constructions was considered groundbreaking, bringing a new dimension to the use of color in three-dimensional space.
Neo-Concretists believed that artworks were not simply static representations or forms; rather “art should be like living organisms” [5] In Lygia Clark’s theoretical statement written to address the intentions of the Neo-Concrete artists, she explains that as artists they wish to “found a new, expressive ‘space’.”[8] This movement believed that through a direct relationship between the artwork and the viewer this “new, expressive ‘space’” could be constructed.
Born with cubism, as a reaction against the impressionist disintegration of poetic language, it was natural that so-called geometric art should situate itself in a position diametrically opposed to the technical and allusive resources of ordinary painting.
The new achievements of physics and mechanics, in opening up a wide perspective for objective thought, encouraged, among those who continued this revolution, the tendency towards an everincreasing rationalization of the processes and purposes of painting.
A mechanicalist notion of construction invaded the language of painters and sculptors, generating, in turn, equally extreme responses of a reactionary nature, such as magical or irrationalist realism, Dada, or surrealism.
We propose a reinterpretation of neo-plasticism, constructivism, and other similar movements, basing ourselves on their expressive successes and making the work of art take precedence over theory.
It does not matter what mathematical equations are at the root of a sculpture or a painting by Vantongerloo, because only in the experience of its direct perception does the work provide the “meaning” of its rhythms and colors.
Whether Pevsner started from figures of descriptive geometry or not is irrelevant, when one confronts the new space that his sculptures generate and the cosmic-organic expression that, through it, its forms reveal.
Determining the ways in which artistic objects and scientific instruments, or the artist’s intuition and the physicist’s and engineer’s objective thought, converged may be interesting from a cultural standpoint, but from an aesthetic standpoint, the work of art provokes interest precisely because of what it possesses that transcends these external circumstances—because of the universe of existential meanings that merge and are revealed in the work of art.
Malevich, having recognized the superiority of “pure perception in art,” placed his theoretical definitions in a position that was safe from the limitations of rationalism and mechanicalism, projecting a transcendent dimension in his paintings that guarantees him a notable relevance today.
But Malevich’s daring cost him dearly, in simultaneously opposing both figurative art and mechanicalist abstraction, for to this day certain rationalist theoreticians consider him a naïf who did not understand the true sense of the new plastic arts … In fact, Malevich already expressed, within “geometric” painting, his dissatisfaction, his desire to transcend the rational and the sensorial, which today is undeniably manifest.
Thus, the concepts of form, space, time, and structure—which in the arts are linked to an existential meaning, emotive and affective—are confused with their theoretical application by science.
The influence of technology and science was manifest here as well, to the degree that today, with their roles reversed, certain artists, confused by that terminology, attempt to make art starting from these objective notions in order to apply them as a creative method.
Neo-concrete art, affirming the absolute integration of these elements, vouches for the ability of its “geometric” vocabulary to assume the expression of complex human realities, manifest in many works by Mondrian, Malevich, Pevsner, Gabo, Sofia Taeuber-Arp, etc.
Gestalt theory, in that it is still a psychology based on the concept of causation, also proves insufficient in helping us understand that phenomenon that dissolves the causally definable realities of space and form and presents them as time, as the spatialization of the work.
Therefore, unlike rationalist concretism, which views the word as object and transforms it into a mere optical signal, neo-concrete poetry restores it to its condition as “verbum,” that is, to the human mode of presentation of the real.
In its turn, neo-concrete prose, opening up a new field for expressive experiments, recovers language as flux, overcoming its syntactical contingencies and giving new, fuller meaning to certain solutions that until now were erroneously accepted as poetry.