This document reflects the constructivist philosophy that guided a good part of Brazilian artistic production in the 1950s. In that era, diverse sectors of society—business, politics, artists and intellectuals—bet on industrialization as a sine qua non solution for the socio-economic problems of the country. Those artists who opted to align themselves with the poetics of constructivism sought to create an “objective” art of communication that could be shared through national industries. Waldemar Cordeiro (1925?73) assigns a didactic character to modern art (to concrete art in particular) believing that it was capable of creating an awareness more suited to the understanding of the new challenges of the modern world. From 1947, Luiz Sacilotto (1924?2003) was linked to artists connected with Cordeiro, who came together—through him after his arrival from Rome, where he was born and educated—to explore abstract trends and that burst onto the Brazilian arts scene (1952) as the “grupo ruptura” (with lower case letters, as shown in the group’s logo included in their manifesto) after the first São Paulo biennial. Note that the same argument, here used to emphasize that “there is no continuity between art of the past and current art” within Sacilotto’s work, would months later be integrated into the “manifesto ruptura.”
[As a complementary reading, see in the ICAA digital archive by Charoux, Cordeiro, de Barros, Féjer, Haar, Sacilotto and Wladyslaw the “ruptura” manifesto (doc. no. 771349) and their manuscript (doc. no. 1232213); by Décio Pignatari “Seja breve: Décio Pignatari escreve resenha-depoimento sobre o artista plastico Luiz Sacilotto” (doc. no. 1233093), and “Sacilotto: expressões e concreções” (doc. no. 1087263); by Frederico de Morais “Sacilotto: obras selecionadas: de 24 de maio (quarta-feira) a 24 de junho de 1995” (doc. no. 1233108); and by Enock Sacramento “Luiz Sacilotto, nosso artista em Zurich” (doc. no. 1233137)].