Architect Sérgio Ferro affirms in this text that new painting in Brazil may be characterized by re-establishing a connection to the surrounding reality, and the levels of abstraction achieved by concrete art, informal art, and tachisme were preventing direct communication with the people; he upholds the need to look for the phenomena, facts, and contradictions of reality. His reasoning was based on a political commitment that had become radicalized due to his concern over the existence of generalized alienation, under-development, and even imperialism. Brazil had been under a military dictatorship for a year following a Fascist coup. Ferro notices (as a response to everything happening) an oscillation between nihilism, utopian searches, and critical dilemmas that generate a new vocabulary without concern for the unity, correctness or elegance of that language, nor its relevance. Both “crudeness” and “aggressiveness” are portrayed in order to demystify the contradictions of a reality that (naively) denies an all-encompassing vision, and instead offers individual manifestations (through various forms of realism) that need to be combined in order for the new artistic language shown in Propostas 65 to be discerned.

The exhibition Propostas 65 took place at the FAAP (Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado) in 1965, and along with the Opinião 65 show, constitutes a collective manifestation of the Brazilian strain of the New Figuration. Both debates and conferences for artists and art critics were organized around the exhibition.

Sérgio Ferro (b. 1938), the architect and artist, graduated during the construction of Brasilia (1956?61) and worked in the office of architect Francisco Vilanova Artigas (in São Paulo); he was a student of Artigas and Flávio Motta. Together with another architect, Rodrigo Lefèvre, and the stage designer Flávio Império founded the Nova Arquitetura group. He was a sharp critic of the profession, of its mode of expression (drawing), as well as its production. While he was still a student, he proposed a debate on class warfare and the need for an alliance between construction workers and draftsmen who could create another aesthetic based on the “poetics of the economy” which would confront real national problems. In this text, the influences on Ferro’s writing become evident, both leftist French intellectuals and the “School of Frankfurt,” as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. He was determined to construct a critical theory that would correct the flaws in the aesthetic and production systems of architecture. Both architects, Ferro & Lefèvre, were forced to flee Brazil during the military dictatorship; Ferro became a professor of architecture at the Université de Grenoble (France) in 1972 and Lefèvre died tragically in Guinea-Bissau in the mid-1980s.

[As a complementary reading, see other texts by the author in the ICAA digital archive: “Arquitetura nova” (doc. no. 1111153); “A forma da arquitetura e o desenho da mercadoria” (doc. no. 1111152); “Os limites da denúncia” (doc. no. 771159); and “Pintura nova” (doc. no. 1090696)].