Primo Jim Tanya Huntington Hyde - Literal

The Girl and The Shoe, 1949. Cemetery of Tatuapé, São Paulo
a movement that advocated an end to fi gurative
(representational) art and promoted an
objective art that pointed only to itself. It was
also an art with the social mission of making
art accessible to people’s lives as designs for
modern living. Some Concrete artists de-romanticized
the role of the artist and regarded
themselves as mere workers. They also saw
their vision of art as a timely one vis-à-vis
Brazil’s ongoing modernization. Geraldo became
a prominent member of the group and
participated in national and international exhibits
of Concrete art.
In 1954 received an artistic award that
was handed to him by the president of Brazil,
Getulio Vargas himself. That same year his
friend, Joana Cunha Bueno, introduced Geraldo
to Frei João Batista Pereira dos Santos,
a Dominican priest at the Chapel of Christ
the Worker. The chapel congregated an important
group of artists, architects, and intellectuals
interested in providing workers
with tools for survival and cultural improvement.
The chapel itself featured works by
prominent artists like Alfredo Volpi. Geraldo
and Frei João Batista established Unilabor, a
worker-owned cooperative for making furniture.
Geraldo participated enthusiastically
in this utopian experiment designing “intel-
ligent” furnishings for the masses that the
Unilabor workers would produce. However,
by 1964, the cooperative was beset with
fi nancial and managerial diffi culties; the ultra-rightist
military coup of March 31 st made
the experiment politically suspect. Moreover,
Unilabor’s management considered that he
was dispensable. Geraldo left Unilabor and
joined Aluisio Bioni in creating the Hobjeto
privately-owned furniture factory. The name
was a combination that Geraldo came up
with: Hoje (today) and Objeto (object) = today’s
object.
In 1960 Brazil inaugurated its new capital,
Brasilia. Around this time, Geraldo discovered
Pop Art and returned to fi gurative
painting. In 1966, together with the artists
Nelson Leirner and Wesley Duke Lee, he
opened Rex Gallery & Sons in the back room
of one of the Hobjeto stores. Wesley Duke
Lee remembered that they placed a large
bronze plaque with the name of the gallery
—like a British bank would—to show they
meant serious business. The gallery was a
place of happenings and sponsored an eclectic
assortment of art that was different from
the extremes that had been so common for
the last fi fteen years. According to his friend
Nelson Leirner, Geraldo confronted a new
critical universe by appropriating “outdoors”
(billboards?) he found in the street and modifi
ed them by painting them and making collages
with them. “His concept was to bring
elements from the street to the inside and
from the inside back to the street.” However,
Geraldo stopped his re-launched Pop artistic
career in order to focus on Hobjeto. Leirner
states that Geraldo was able to stop art and
48 4 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2008
Some Concrete artists de-romanticized the
role of the artist and regarded themselves
as mere workers. They also saw their vi-
sion of art as a timely one vis-à-vis Brazil’s
ongoing modernization.
then start again like Duchamp used to stop
to play chess.
Those years were the preamble to his
fi rst stroke. In 1988, Geraldo suffered a succession
of new strokes that further incapacitated
him and confi ned him to a wheel-chair.
Nevertheless, he continued to sketch and
plan new works.
In Geraldo’s story there is an important
chapter where the main protagonist is his
daughter Fabiana de Barros —an artist in her
own right. She played a crucial role in the recognition
of her father’s work. It was thanks to
Fabiana’s efforts that in 1993, the Musee de
L’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland brought to
Europe a major exhibition of his work: Geraldo
de Barros: Peintre et Photographe. This
exhibition opened the door to the international
recognition of Geraldo’s work and the
publication of several books about his work.
Curiously, this renewed interest in his oeuvre
focused on his photography of four decades
earlier. Fotoformas, the series of works that
propelled his career in 1950, were exhibited,
written about, and understood anew fortysomething
years after their fi rst showing.
Geraldo was not immune to this enthusiasm.
Once again, he put the dice on an assistant’s
hand and threw more numbers. In the last
two years of his life, Geraldo produced two
hundred fi fty new photographic works. He
titled the series Sobras because they were
made from photographs of his family and
travel albums that were never destined to
anything but mementos. “A photograph belongs
to the one who makes something out
of it, not necessarily to the one who took it,”
Geraldo once said.