In this text, critic Mário Pedrosa analyzes the show of collages by painter Ivan Serpa held in Washington, D. C. in 1954. He remarks on Serpa’s career and on his choice of abstraction. Pedrosa also comments on the impact on Serpa’s work of contact with works by Swiss concrete artists like Max Bill at the Primeira Bienal de São Paulo (1951); that event was a turning point in Serpa’s research in concrete art. Pedrosa considers Serpa’s collages essential to his inquiries into color. He describes Serpa’s method and innovative chromatic combinations in which diverse materials come together. In Pedrosa’s view, Serpa is able to obtain purely physical color (color-light) by layering transparent sheets of paper while also, by means of opaque materials, producing a chromatism in which the object as support is no longer necessary in what the artist calls “colors in themselves.”

This text addresses the work of Ivan Serpa (1923–73), one of the most outstanding representatives of the concrete movement in Rio de Janeiro; in the forties, Serpa was one of the first artists in what was then the country’s capital to produce abstract paintings and drawings. He was the leader of the Grupo Frente from 1954 to 1956, a point of reference in early Brazilian constructivism. Serpa’s disciples in that group included Lygia Clark, Abraham Palatnik, Almir Mavignier, and the Oiticica brothers (César and Hélio). In this text, critic Mário Pedrosa points out the artisanal and intuitive nature of Serpa’s method as opposed to concretism’s more orthodox approaches. Pedrosa also places Serpa’s production in the international context, tying it to the work of those concrete artists who engaged color through light rather than through pigments. In the fifties, Pedrosa published a number of articles where he compares Brazilian production and the work of the international avant-garde, particularly in relation to different poetics of light.

[For further reading, see in the ICAA digital archive the following texts by Mário Pedrosa: “Abstração ou figuração ou realismo?” (doc. no. 1085648), “Da abstração a auto-expressão” (doc. no. 1085707), “Da dissolução do objeto ao vanguardismo brasileiro” (doc. no. 1110435), and “Paulistas e cariocas” (doc. no. 1085056)].

Intellectual and politician Mário Pedrosa (1900–81) was unquestionably the pivotal figure in 20th-century Brazilian art theory and criticism. He began as an international politics correspondent for the Diário da Noite. He joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in the 1920s, and in 1932 he was arrested for his political activism as a Trotskyite. During the Estado Novo under Getúlio Vargas, Pedrosa lived in exile in France and New York, returning to Brazil after World War II. A contributor to Correio da Manhã, he later founded the weekly Vanguarda Socialista due to his anti-Stalinist position. For his doctoral thesis in aesthetics, entitled “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” (1949), presented at the Faculdade de Arquitetura (Rio), he made use of his background in philosophy and Gestalt psychology. He was one of the founders of International Association of Art Critics (AICA) (1948) and he helped organize the International Congress of Art Critics (Brasilia, 1959). From 1950 to 1954, he wrote a column on art for Tribuna da Imprensa and, in that decade, he was a member of the organizing committee for the 2nd and 3rd editions of the São Paulo Biennial (1953 and 1955 respectively) before becoming the director of MAM-SP from 1961 to 1963. He was the Secretary of the National Council of Culture during Jânio Quadros’s brief term as president. During the military dictatorship in Brazil, he sought exile in Chile where he directed the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. After the coup under Pinochet (1973), he went to Havana where he was the secretary of the Museo de la Resistencia Salvador Allende. He did not return to Brazil until 1977, at the beginning of the amnesty. In 1980, he was the first person to sign the manifesto founding the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Part of his vast library (some eight thousand volumes) is available at the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.