Luciano Figueiredo (Fortaleza CE 1948)
Intermedia artist, graphic designer, set designer and painter.
Luciano Henrique Pereira de Figueiredo began his professional life in the 1960s as a set designer in Salvador. In 1967, he took part in the 9th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo [São Paulo International Biennial]. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and began creating sets for music shows and plays and developing graphic designs for records, books and magazines, among them Navilouca, edited by the poets Torquato Neto (1944 - 1972) and Waly Salomão (1944 - 2003). Between 1972 and 1978, he lived in London, where he studied art history and English literature, became interested in the visual possibilities of the printed newspaper page and, based on his research, developed paintings and three-dimensional objects with collages, wire meshes and monochromatic reliefs. Back in Brazil, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he worked as art director on films by the filmmaker Júlio Bressane (1946). Between 1981 and 1995, he served as technical director of the Projeto Hélio Oiticica [Hélio Oiticica Project] in Rio de Janeiro and, in 1994, was responsible for the Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark special rooms at the 22nd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. He was appointed director of the Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas [National Institute of Visual Arts] of the Fundação Nacional de Arte - Funarte [National Arts Foundation] in 1986 and founded the Instituto Nacional de Artes Gráficas [National Institute of Graphic Arts] within the same body two years later. At the same time, he held several exhibitions of paintings and objects in galleries in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Critical Commentary
Luciano Figueiredo has pursued a career as a graphic designer alongside his career as a visual artist. He shows a graphic interest combined with a link to experimentalism, understood as a willingness to use elements identified with everyday precariousness in the construction of the art object. The resulting work does not favor any type of support or material. Fabrics or newspapers are appropriated by the artist, who creates reliefs, exploring densities, transparencies and the recomposition of signs.
As the critic Paulo Sérgio Duarte notes, Luciano Figueiredo's work is affiliated with constructivism and its graphic tradition. The type area of the newspaper page exerts an aesthetic appeal that the artist explores in various ways. Since the early 1980s, he has made works starting from the plane, using newspaper and wire screens to which paint is applied. The chromatic density results from the overlapping of the meshes. In later works, he presents reliefs on canvases over wood or uses newspaper sheets and squares of voile, glued to one another alternately, on which he makes cuts and folds, creating visual rhythms. His works recall the production of Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968). Later he also made sculptures, such as the Objetos-Torres [Tower-Objects], exhibited in 1994, with which he generates optical effects through the symmetrical juxtaposition of wooden strips, exploring questions of fragility and balance.
In an exhibition held in 2004, Figueiredo presented visual poems associated with silhouettes taken from newspapers. However, most of his more recent production consists of paintings in which he explores color contrasts and transparencies. In Paulo Sérgio Duarte's opinion, the reference to earlier works remains only in the "rectangles and squares that were once newspaper pages".
Critiques
"Emerging with Tropicalism, Luciano Figueiredo's work takes on to this day (1988) one of the central questions of the movement, so emphatically made explicit by Hélio Oiticica - experimentalism, understood here as a willingness to resort to any element that allows the construction of poetics that take advantage of the precariousness of Brazilian everyday life. From this engagement results a work that does not favor any material or support, and is for that very reason parallel to the return to painting, or to any other visual medium consecrated by tradition, characteristic of the emerging production of the 1980s. (...) It can certainly be stated that the graphic element is a kind of link between the works of Luciano Figueiredo the designer and the artist. His visual work, from the beginning, has been built from a graphic gaze, although, because of its link with experimentalism, it has systematically refused to be framed in categories such as drawing or printmaking. Materials such as fabric, newspaper, etc., treated not as a support but as a premise for invention, have always been appropriated by the artist for their possibilities of configuring transparencies, densities, fragmentation and recomposition of signs. The interest in these strictly visual questions, combined with the use of the word, physically incorporated into many of his works, although absent in the current pieces, indicates the constant, often concealed, manifestation of a graphic intelligence throughout his work".
Fernando Cocchiarale
LUCIANO Figueiredo: diorama. Apresentação de Fernando Cocchiarale. Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Paulo Klabin, 1988.
Solo Exhibitions
1984 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Paulo Klabin
1986 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Paulo Klabin
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Paulo Klabin
1990 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria de Arte São Paulo
1991 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria de Arte São Paulo
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Centro Cultural Sérgio Porto
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Luciano Figueiredo: Relevos [Luciano Figueiredo: Reliefs], at Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Luciano Figueiredo: Relevos [Luciano Figueiredo: Reliefs], at Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Hélio Oiticica: cor, imagem e poética [Hélio Oiticica: Color, Image and Poetics], at Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Dioramas e Muxarabiês [Dioramas and Mashrabiyas], at Lurixs: Arte Contemporânea
Group Exhibitions
1965 - Salvador BA - Group show, at Galeria do Instituto Goethe
1966 - Salvador BA - 1ª Bienal Nacional de Artes Plásticas [1st National Visual Arts Biennial]
1966 - Salvador BA - Group show, at Galeria do Instituto Goethe
1967 - São Paulo SP - 9ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo [9th São Paulo International Biennial], at Fundação Bienal
1968 - Salvador BA - 2ª Bienal Nacional de Artes Plásticas [2nd National Visual Arts Biennial]
1970 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Salão de Verão [Summer Salon], at MAM/RJ
1975 - London (England) - Amour Artists, at Polytechnic of Central London
1978 - New York (United States) - Exhibition, at Nobe Gallery
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Exhibition, at Galeria Sérgio Milliet/Funarte
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Caligrafias e Escrituras [Calligraphies and Writings], at Funarte - Galeria Sérgio Milliet
1985 - São Paulo SP - 26 Artistas [26 Artists], at Galeria Klabin
1985 - São Paulo SP - Tendências do Livro de Artista no Brasil [Trends of the Artist's Book in Brazil], at CCSP
1985 - São Paulo SP - Poesia Evidência [Poetry Evidence], at PUC/SP
1987 - São Paulo SP - Palavra Imágica [Imagic Word], at MAC/USP
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Papéis no Espaço [Papers in Space], at Galeria Aktuell
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A Ordem Desfeita [The Undone Order], at Galeria 110
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Rio Hoje [Rio Today], at MAM/RJ
1989 - São Paulo SP - Acervo [Collection], at Escritório de Arte São Paulo
1991 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Imagem sobre Imagem [Image upon Image], at Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bastidores da Criação [Behind the Scenes of Creation], at Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A Imagem do Som de Chico Buarque [The Image of Sound of Chico Buarque], at Paço Imperial
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Jornal Aberto [Open Newspaper], at Museu do Telefone
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Situações: arte brasileira anos 70 [Situations: Brazilian Art of the 1970s], at Fundação Casa França-Brasil
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A Trajetória: o experimento do artista, a trajetória e o processo [The Trajectory: The Artist's Experiment, the Trajectory and the Process], at Funarte
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 9º Universidarte [9th Universidarte], at Universidade Estácio de Sá - Galeria Maria Martins
2001 - São Paulo SP - Trajetória da Luz na Arte Brasileira [Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art], at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Niterói RJ - A Recente Coleção do MAC [The Recent MAC Collection], at MAC/Niterói
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Artefoto, at CCBB
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Genealogia do Espaço [Genealogy of Space], at Galeria do Parque das Ruínas
2003 - Brasília DF - Artefoto, at CCBB
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Galeria Lurixs Arte Contemporânea: exposição inaugural [Galeria Lurixs Arte Contemporânea: Inaugural Exhibition], at Lurixs: Arte Contemporânea
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Tudo é Brasil [Everything Is Brazil], at Paço Imperial
2004 - São Paulo SP - Tudo é Brasil [Everything Is Brazil], at Itaú Cultural
Source: Itaú Cultural
