Luciano Figueiredo: Reliefs. Gaze-Gesture-Object

The new exhibition by Rio de Janeiro based Luciano Figueiredo (b. 1948, Fortaleza) comprises eighteen works in acrylic on canvas, all from 2015. Theses pieces are originated by a two level artistic interference: first, by folding the canvas many times, the artist create his geometric reliefs, on which he will interfere a second time, now painting geometric images on top of the also geometric shapes of the canvas.

According to curator Paulo Venancio Filho his reliefs “attest one of the most continuous adherences to constructivism, either in history or in the artistic actuality”, and are created by the same experimental attitude that made the Brazilian abstract-geometric experience as relevant as it was. While facing the works, the viewer can’t find the categories to describe them, not knowing if they are reliefs, paintings, objects, or all three. Still according to the curator: “painting because it is placed on the wall; relief because it unfolds from the wall, object because it imposes its own materiality beyond the wall. Invention would certainly be the word to accurately name them”.

This new series also makes reference to the newspaper – probably the central object of Luciano Figueiredo’s long investigation and visual research. The same gestures all of us make almost unconsciously while reading the paper in the morning – opening, folding, leafing, closing –, are made with complete awareness and technical precision by the artist, acknowledging the form a life of its own, and exceeding the initial reference of the newspaper. This research is then, even if by contiguity, also in proximity to the book; that was another object of systematic and significant constructive research, especially in the context of Brazilian art.

Luciano Figueiredo started painting in the 1960s with Adam Firnekaes, painter and musician form Bauhaus, Germany. Transiting between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro in the period of his education, he frequently participated in collective exhibitions and cultural movements. The artist asserted himself as an exponent of the Brazilian counterculture movement in the 1970s through the production of music performances’ scenography, graphic design projects, cinema and mainly thanks to his participation in the historic publication Navilouca. During this period his production is strongly marked by experimental and interdisciplinary collaborations. He lived in London, between 1972 and 1978, where he studied Art History and English Literature. During that same period, he began his research using newspaper prints, following the fluxus of experimentation with his visual poems made with cutout words, colour stains, and mainly using British tabloids. His investigation led, since 1975, to the construction of three-dimensional objects with collages, wire meshes, and monochromatic reliefs, represented in exhibitions held in art galleries in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo from 1984 onwards.