London Gallery Shines a Light on Seminal Figure in Brazilian Op-Art Movement
Cecilia Brunson Projects to show the first UK presentation of Luiz Sacilotto’s work, opening 15 September
By Eric Block
From the 15th of September until the 30th of November, Cecilia Brunson Projects will be showing works by Brazilian artist Luiz Sacilotto. Sacilotto was one of the main creative forces behind Brazil’s Concrete art movement and a key innovator of Op Art, equal to Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Yet he remains relatively unknown outside of his native Brazil.
This exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects brings together works from Sacilotto’s later period, where he innovates on the traditionally darker palette and carefully meaningless geometry of Concrete art to create brightly coloured, achieving mind-bending optical illusions. The show contains both finished canvas pieces and paper and gouache studies so the viewer can appreciate the experimentation involved in Sacilotto’s practice. Displayed for example is one gouache study, undertaken two years after the piece Concretion 8068 (also on show) which makes use of the same carefully replicated rotating triangles of the canvas piece, but in almost perfect negative, so the waves rise out of the blue wedges, rather than the blank space.
Luiz Sacilotto started his artistic career not in a classic art school, but in the industrial background of São Paulo’s South Eastern suburbs, where his parents moved to from Italy in the 1920s. In the post-war period, these neighbourhoods became the locus for Brazilian modernisation. It was because of this industrialisation that Sacilotto first trained in artistic practices; he gained qualifications as a painter-decorator from the Instituto Profissional Masculino and the Escola Técnica Getúlio Vargas, before working as a typeface designer and designer-draughtsman for a variety of industrial and architectural firms.
The technical accuracy required in his day jobs fed into his artistic production. Luiz Sacilotto was a member of ‘Ruptura’, a radical art group who believed in creating Concrete art — that is, art which is strictly images without any basis in reality, nor any symbolic meaning, and signed their manifesto in 1952. The leader of the Ruptura group, Waldemar Cordiero, described Sacilotto as the ‘main beam’ of Concretism in Brazil, due to his impressive talent for creating careful geometric sequences. Even in the year before his death, Sacilotto was able to paint his precise shapes with only a brush and sometimes a matchstick guide.
Sacilotto had taken a decade long sabbatical before making the works on show at Cecilia Brunson Projects, from 1963 to 1973. He did so not as a way of refining his production, but in response to the establishment of the Military dictatorship in Brazil which, he felt, was forcing him and his compatriots into artistic silence. Yet although Sacilotto didn’t leave behind his day jobs to become a full-time artist until 1977, the dynamic corpus which he created over his 60 year career attests to his position as a hugely important artist in a genre which long dominated Brazilian art.
CBP say “It is a privilege to be showing work by Luiz Sacilotto, whose part in a global movement linked the Brazilian art scene with artists such as Bridget Riley, and whose works testify to his significance as a visionary Concrete artist.” This show will prove Sacilotto’s extraordinary skill as both a Concrete artist and an innovator of Op Art on par with its other international practitioners when it opens mid September.
This exhibition will be shown in the viewing gallery, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2G Royal Oak Yard, Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3GD.
The gallery is open Wednesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm.
To learn more about the exhibition, visit: www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com/exhibitions/78/
