This is an example of Mário Pedrosa’s research into the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity in the 1940s. In this essay the author relies on Gestalt’s teaching (the Psychology of Form) on the subject of aesthetic perception. Highlighting the polished forms of its commitment to “direct communication,” Pedrosa rejects Informal Abstraction, accusing the movement of sacrificing “the psychic distance” between viewer and artist in favor of an explicit hedonism that seeks to transform the work into “an individualized person” that can only project its sentimental anxieties and the neurosis of its private life.
Among other “contingencies” he associates with Tachisme, Pedrosa notes the repetition of gestures, of forms and anti-forms, and the calligraphic tendency of Informal Abstraction that, in his opinion, “is guilty of the arbitrariness of its pretensions.” In response to the automatic and mechanical speed displayed by tachist artists (in their paintings), the critic points to the instinctive lines drawn by Raphael, an intern at the National Psychiatric Center at the Engenho de Dentro (Rio de Janeiro). In view of the excessive graphic elements and motifs in their work, and their “virtuosity that lacks any violent contact with the subject matter,” Pedrosa concludes that the tachists “possess no true vitality.” They are, he says, “overwhelmed by eccentricity” [see also the following essay by Pedrosa in the ICAA digital archive, “Do ‘informal’ e seus equívocos” (doc. no. 1085759)].
