Professor Walter Zanini, the director of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (an affiliate of the Universidade de São Paulo), begins his introductory essay by congratulating the graphic artist and painter Lothar Charoux on behalf of the institution that organized this Restrospectiva. The exhibition, which includes works produced in the last three decades, seeks to go beyond his Concrete production (via Geometric Abstraction) by showing his early figurative works from the 1940s, which are not at all well known. The public is mainly interested in what the author calls the “Op precoz” (Early Op) produced by this distinguished “morphologist of pure lines.” Charoux was a member of the Grupo Ruptura and a signatory of its 1952 manifesto, and his mature approach to this style contributed on a personal level to the Concrete art movement during the 1950s. The exhibition includes his portfolio of drawings, which reveal his constant experimentation with the line and his preference for dark backgrounds and a vertical position. In Zanini’s opinion, a key feature of this artist’s work is the role played by lines on the support, either as “luminous vibrations” or as “intermittent kinetic pulsations.”   

In his review of Charoux’s work, the author detects the influence of his teacher, Waldemar da Costa, and some of the “intuitive” members of the Grupo Santa Helena’s “expressionist accents.” These small paintings (with organic connotations), produced in 1947, were not as important to him as his explorations in the field of Geometric Abstraction. What is remarkable, however, is his kind of “digital drawing” (using neither ruler nor drawing pen). His first truly Geometric paintings, produced in 1951, featured primary and neutral chromatic zones. Zanini mentions some of Charoux’s formal works: the “tortinhos” (little twists, 1967); the use of letters in his Constructive explorations; the importance of the gaps between lines that generate a tension between the lines and the imagination. All these are an intrinsic part of his unmistakable pattern in Brazilian art.  

Lothar Charoux (b. 1912; d. 1987) was a painter and draftsman; he was born in Vienna, where he started studying art with his uncle, the sculptor Siegfried Charoux. When he was sixteen years old, he settled in Brazil, where he studied under Waldemar da Costa in the 1930s and made a name for himself painting landscapes and portraits from 1948 to 1952. His involvement in the Grupo Ruptura, which was led by Waldemar Cordeiro, laid the groundwork for this embrace of Concrete art and Geometric Abstraction. In 1973 he was one of the founders of the Associação de Artes Visuais Novas Tendências. 

Professor Walter Zanini (b. 1925; d. 2013), the art critic, historian, and curator, was the first director of the MAC-USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo). During his tenure there (1963–78), he encouraged emerging artists by supporting fringe forms of artistic expression, from technological and conceptual approaches to multimedia projects based on visual languages. Zanini was one of the curators at the first Bienal de São Paulo (1951) and a teacher at the ECA-USP (Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo). He wrote this article, which was published in the Sunday supplement of O Tempo, a São Paulo newspaper, in 1954, while he was still a student at the Université de Paris. Zanini’s comments in the document and the reproduction of the Atelier Abstração’s manifesto are interspersed with images of paintings by Flexor and Douchez and a photo of the young artists at work in Flexor’s studio.