Samson Flexor: Strokes and Abstractions

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo has spaces that inspire us to embrace challenging curatorial proposals: there are several visualities immersed in a collection of more than ten thousand pieces. In addition to these possible visual routes, the challenge lies in designing an exposition that surpasses the mere illustrative scenography in order to approach a curatorial creation in which text, expography and artworks interact perfectly. Due to discussions on scenography, the museum relaunched questions about “visuality of certain aesthetic phenomena for understanding works of art”. For example, in a comparison between theater and visual arts, the playwright’s text would be the curator’s research that—with motivations and concepts—create a piece of knowledge. But the role of the director would be the museographer . In the particular case of the exhibition “Samson Flexor: Traçados e Abstrações” [Strokes and Abstractions], the interaction of the curator and the designer enabled a fruitful discussion unveiled in an understanding of the exhibition style and the imbrications of the curatorial text along with the proposed construction of the space. And what about the artworks, the actors? How do they situate themselves? The selection of artworks in this exhibition gathers part of Samson Flexor’s drawings and paintings belonging to MAC USP collection on Samson Flexor. It presents aspects of his career, and this enable us to visualize his investigation and the plastic transformation that his production went through. Five paintings are the support points for the correlations the drawings try to situate, and the groups of drawings try to follow a movement in which “the design builds and spatializes the structure of Flexor’s artistic thinking process, reflected on paintings that point to formal structures on the artist’s language.”

Thus, the exhibition “Samson Flexor: Traçados e Abstrações” [Strokes and Abstractions] is a presentation of the artist’s production emphasizing geometric abstraction, with artworks from 1948 to 1960. The drawings point to evident relations in Flexor’s artistic language —as a result, the title of the exhibition comes from them—and these relations reveal at times his visual thought, forms, plans, spaces in diagrams that project themselves in many of his artistic works. Pencil and ink drawings show us part of the studio work, allowing us to contact that which normally stays out of the public sight. On observing it, we come to realize that art is the result of meticulous work, dedication to the “doing”, and especially a constant search for a language that develops over time. Finally, we emphasize that Samson Flexor: Traçados e Abstrações” [Strokes and Abstractions] could build an overview of the artist’s work to the visitor. Walter Zanini defined it as “a research for calculated organization of shapes and colors, with constant attention to the movement that reaches a climax on pictures with multiple poles of escape, with spaces that emerge and recede and later approaches a gestural painting to develop a rigorous and systematic figuration of its plastic”.