Art critic Márcio Doctors analyzes the work of Lygia Pape, whom he considers the most radical of the three Neo-Concrete artists (Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Pape). These artists set out to confront the radical experience of space as if it were finite; as a matter of fact, their experiences came to erase the boundaries between “what was within” and “what was outside.” In Doctors’s opinion, “Pape’s visual-art exercise leaves no room for negation (…); her strategy is to occupy the spaces that go beyond affirmation. This would not take the form of negation (which is a confirmation of the void), [but] rather stem from a positive approach (a confirmation of fullness).” The writer believes that the complexity of this work resides “in the coherence of the artist’s objectives, leading her to imagine the work from within her own otherness.” At the end of the article, Doctors sets forth a “Guide for the capture of Lygia Pape,” which is a series of topics/categories through which the work may be read, as follows: ambivalence, graphic behavior, anti-narration, and movement. 

The artwork of Lygia Pape (1927−2004) encompassed a number of fields: sculpture, printmaking (Livro-poema, 1960), dance (Ballet neoconcreto, 1960), and film (O guarda-chuva vermelho [The red umbrella, 1971]). She began her art studies with Ivan Serpa, of the Grupo Frente, in Rio de Janeiro (1955). Her participation in the Neo-Concrete movement can be traced back to its manifesto, launched in the Jornal do Brasil in March 1959. Pape went on to be a symbolic figure, with radical approaches throughout the 1960s, producing videos and installations that satirized the military dictatorship (1964−85), and she continued her activities for decades after that. These metaphors became more subtle in the 1980s, a full decade of somatic apologia, when her work came to be a vehicle for bodily and other major life events including existential, sensory, and psychological experiences. Geometry, the Concrete art legacy, was always central to Pape’s subsequent works. At the same time, her approaches alternated from a highly intellectual focus to inviting physical participation of the active viewer. A list of her most noteworthy works would include Tecelares, and her trilogy Livro da criação/ Livro do tempo/ Livro da arquitetura (all in 1959), and subsequently, TtEias [Spiderwebs, 1979].

Art critic and independent curator Márcio Doctors was the private secretary of the well-known Brazilian theoretician, politician, and critic, Mário Pedrosa, and he also writes on art in the Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper O Globo. He currently serves as curator for the Fundação Eva Klabin Rapaport, also located in Rio.

Frederico Morais’s text, “Contra a arte afluente: o corpo é o motor da obra” [doc. no. 1110685], examines paradigmatic cases such as that of Lygia Clark.