The combative painter, designer, landscape painter, art critic, and theoretician Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–73) outlines his ideas on theory and practice in the field of art and technological advances. After being part of the Ruptura Concrete art group (1952) in the 1950s, and creating his semantic objects—or “Popcretos”—in the 1960s, he continued with his artistic experiments. With the help of the German thinker Max Bense, for example, the “Pop” concept led him to a dialectical approach that fluctuated between “things” and “realities.” Cordeiro is convinced that contemporary art relies on an objective language that presents things (or semantic items) that have nothing to do with illustration, which he calls “semantic concrete art.” He discusses this idea, and others, in his essay published in HABITAT, the architectural magazine, “Novas tendências e nova figuração” [see doc. no. 1110840].
Cordeiro also worked as an art critic; in the late 1940s he began reviewing Brazilian abstract and Concrete art in his own very distinctive style. He began his career in Rome, but then after the war, he came to Brazil, from where his father came. He settled in São Paulo, and as his articles began to appear in the local Italian community newspapers, he gradually emerged as the leader and spokesman of the radical concrete movement called “Ruptura.” From the early 1950s, Cordeiro, like Max Bill, worked with mathematical concepts and geometrical forms that he used as a means rather than as an end.
As it happens, this essay explains why Cordeiro dissociated Concrete art from geometric forms. During the 1960s, when people living in cities were being deluged with images published in the media on a daily basis, Cordeiro insisted that art (given its concrete nature) absolutely must express its ideas in total harmony with the current visual-cultural environment. In his view, the concept of “concrete-ness” became of paramount importance once the question of geometrical accuracy was discarded.
