[2][1] In Brazil, Cordeiro worked as a painter, art critic, and journalist, notably at Folha da Manhã in São Paulo.
[6][7] Through this work at Folha da Manhã, Cordeiro was the self-appointed leader of the Arte Concrete community, made up of artists who came from diverse immigrant backgrounds, such as Anatol Wladyslaw, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Luiz Sacilotto, Kazmer Fejer and Leopoldo Haar.
In the late 1940s, spurred in part by encounters in Rome with the abstraction promoted by the international group known as Art Club (founded by Polish painter Josef Jarema, Italian painter Enrico Prampolini, and others), Cordeiro began to transform forms made up of geometric shapes into a free expression of experimentation with sequences of shapes.
[6] Additionally, from 1950 to his death in 1973, Cordeiro took part in over 150 landscape design and urban planning projects as a practical application of many of the theories of his work.
[6] In a series of critical writings published in the mid-1960s, Cordeiro elaborated his ideas around landscape design "in terms of tensions between the intentionality and planning of the artist-designer, and the 'pragmatic and random' situation" of the person who fulfills, or completes, the work by navigating it.
[11] In 1971, Cordeiro uses a photograph of a Vietnamese girl, burned by a napalm bomb, transforming it into thousands of points by the digital process of the computer.
[11] According to Cordeiro himself, this project aims to perform interdisciplinary works, taking advantage of the fields of psychology and convergent computing in art.
The process worked based on a package of punched cards with the program to be executed, which could take hours, days or weeks, depending on the expected result.