Denying the naturalist tradition and all the expressiveness of romanticism, Constructivist art envisioned the approach of a new life, endowed with greater rigor and rationality. Universalist art, in which painting, sculpture, and architecture would converge into urbanism and design, enriching everyday life with the clarity of geometric reason and the serial logic of industrial production.

Line, color, and surface, in this sense, are not abstract elements, but rather concrete ones, defining a language that has been gaining increasing importance in Brazil since the 1950s, based on simplicity and formal economy. These are the values that guide the set of works presented here, bringing together the production of a broad group of constructive artists and the furniture from the Estúdio Branco & Preto, based in São Paulo in the 1950s.

Both in the works of art and in the design shown here in the house of architect and designer Jorge Zalszupin, structural clarity predominates, and a serial rhythm that does not exhaust itself in graphics, but expands in space with sophistication and delicacy.

Guilherme Wisnik