The art critic and historian Frederico Morais discusses the Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik’s career, describing him as a pioneer—even at an international level—in the creative blending of art and technology that he used to create his kinetic projects. Palatnik exhibited his first “aparelho cinecromático” at the Iª Bienal de São Paulo in 1951. The art critic Mário Pedrosa coined the term “cinecromático” to describe Palatnik’s device; he also wrote “Introito à Bienal,” the first critical review of the artist’s work, which was published that same year in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa. Palatnik later exhibited a set of his colored, moving devices at the XXXII Biennale di Venezia (1964), which led to his participation in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and the United States. According to Morais, Palatnik took part in the Mouvement 2 exhibition, joining some of the biggest names in the international kinetic movement at the event organized by the Galerie Denise René and presented by the French intellectual Jean Cassou. The exhibition included updated versions of kinetic works by several artists who had taken part in Le mouvement (1955) a decade earlier at the same gallery. On a critical level, Morais mentions that Pierre Cabanne, Pierre Restany, and Tomás Maldonado (who, at that time, was the director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm) considered Palatnik to be the most promising precursor of an aesthetic based on light and movement, as was duly noted in L’avant-garde au XXe siècle (1969), the book jointly written by Cabanne and Restany.         

Frederico Morais (b. 1936) is one of the most influential and committed art critics and historians in Brazil. He is still active after many years of promoting and reviewing Brazilian art, most notably while he was the art critic at O Globo, the Rio de Janeiro newspaper, during the three decades spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. He was also a professor, curator, and historian. As the director of the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (1967−73) he was responsible for course programming. He also lectured at several faculties of what was then Guanabara: Escola de Comunicação at the UFRJ, and the Faculdade de Arquitetura at the PUC-RJ, among others. He has published 36 books on Brazilian and Latin American art. He has curated scores of exhibitions in Brazil and elsewhere, including the retrospective Vanguarda Brasileira (Belo Horizonte, 1966) and the Iª Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul (Porto Alegre, 1989).