Milton Dacosta was a pioneer of constructive tendencies in Brazil. Throughout his career, he produced drawings and prints, but it was in the field of painting that he developed a unique language. His cosmopolitan position in the face of Art History, although not derivative, means that the 1950s are recognized as the most significant period in the artist’s production. Series from this period, such as Castelos [Castles] and the sequences Em vermelho [In Red], Em verde [In Green], Em Branco [In White], demonstrate the refined investigation of aspects such as horizontality and verticality, light and shadow, opacity and transparency, density and emptiness.  

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1919, Milton Dacosta was one of the youngest founders of the Núcleo Bernardelli, a group that brought together students and teachers from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in reaction to the institution’s academicism. During his formative years, the model was above all the École de Paris. Dacosta soon incorporated modernist pictorial solutions, particularly the constructive sense of the brushstroke. His journey towards abstraction began with the geometrization and flattening of the figure, visible in the paintings produced between the 1940s and the middle of the following decade. The themes are varied and range from everyday scenes to still lifes and portraits. Saturated with a reflective character, his abstract paintings are not without subjectivity. From this we can understand the particularity of Dacosta’s insertion into the Brazilian constructive movement.  

He has had solo exhibitions at the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (1945); Petite Galerie, Rio de Janeiro (1955 and 1971); and, recently, the retrospective Milton Dacosta: a cor do silêncio, held at Almeida & Dale, São Paulo, Brazil (2018). He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, such as the 25th Venice Biennale (1950); various editions of the São Paulo Biennale (1951, 1955, 1957, 1961 and 1979); the 3rd Panorama of Brazilian Art (1971); among others. His work is in various collections in Brazil and internationally.