Concrete artist and art theorist Waldemar Cordeiro comments on the emergence of new forms of realism in modern art, specifically in Pop art and New Realism, and a more personal strain of art called “popcreta.” Cordeiro considers the gains of nonfigurative art to be irreversible. He claims that there is no way that the new tendencies (which he calls “nts”) could be mistaken for figuration since they constitute a wholly new language that forms part of a new humanism. Despite the contradiction, Concrete art, which reflects on the means of production, makes use of craft techniques. Though Cordeiro advocates visual communication and serialization due to its universal scope, he objects to its physiological bent, which he deems naturalistic. Cordeiro asserts that technological progress has not benefitted everyone and that there is an urgent need for a spiritual nexus capable of bringing man together. Insofar as New Realism presents things directly, turning them into expressive signs, Cordeiro deems it a new language. The ability of those that make use of the work to apprehend it is a function of real, as opposed to ideal, social contexts. In other words, New Realism (Nouveau Réalisme) is research resulting from a back and forth dialectic between similar situations.

Contrarian painter, designer, landscape artist, art critic, and theorist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925−73) was an advocate of a brand of computer-aided creation he called “arteônica.” Cordeiro formulates a paradigm of theory and of participation at the core of art and technological advances. After having participated in the Concrete art group Ruptura (founded in 1952) in the fifties, and formulating semantic objects or “Popcretos” in the sixties, he engaged in research and in artistic experimentation linked to the computer and the plotter, becoming a pioneer in those fields in Brazil and elsewhere.

At this point in his career, Cordeiro was immersed in the concept of a realism informed by his background in Concrete art. As a result, he veered away from abstract or nonfigurative art and from figurativism. That is, he eschewed the term “nova figuração” that he had once defended, instead embracing the term “nouveau réalisme,” formulated by French critic Pierre Restany.

The text “Realismo: musa da vingança e da tristeza” was initially published in the May–June 1965 issue of HABITAT, a magazine based in São Paulo directed by Lina Bo Bardi. It is steeped in a certain fatalism born of an awareness of the failure of “utopias grounded in technology” and of “the irrationalism of abstract rationalism.” This is why Cordeiro tends toward the new humanism crucial to contemporary movements like the Argentinean Nueva Figuración (1961−63) and the French “nouveaux realistes” group, founded in 1960 under the theoretical guidance of Restany. 

For a related text, see Waldemar Cordeiro’s “Novas tendências e nova figuração” [doc. no. 1110840].