A exposição coletiva que encerra o programa de 2025 da Flexa, sob direção artística de Luisa Duarte, propõe um diálogo entre diferentes gerações da arte brasileira, reunindo obras de Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), Lygia Pape (1927–2004), José Damasceno (1968) e Emmanuel Nassar (1949). Texto crítico de Moacir dos Anjos acompanha a mostra, que tem como centralidade a forma como esses artistas transformam a herança construtiva e concreta em linguagem viva, atravessada pela cor, pela inventividade, pela presença do corpo e pela dimensão sensível.

The exhibition constructs an intergenerational landscape that reveals Brazilian art’s capacity to relate to the past through a lens of invention and deviation. As the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera wrote: “(...) it is significant that the two clichés that tend to be imposed on Brazilian art appear antithetical: constructivism and sensuality, grid and body. Yet they coexist in interlocution, dialoguing and mutually transforming one another.” This coexistence—between what is structured and what vibrates, between what belongs to the realm of calculation and what belongs to the realm of affect—runs through the dialogue established among the four artists presented here.

Lygia Pape proposes an investigation of form that surpasses constructive rationality. In her work, geometric rigor is traversed by intervals and sensibilities. Her structures, especially those titled “books,” evoke time and the body, encouraging a perceptual openness. Within them, color and rhythm operate as elements of a poetics that dissolves the boundaries between calculation and intuition.

In Hélio Oiticica, the passage between order and deviation also becomes evident. Beginning with serial structures such as the Metaesquemas, the artist progressively shifts painting into space, freeing it from the plane and from constructive rigidity, as seen in the Relevos espaciais. Oiticica’s gesture does not negate the concrete; it pierces through it. It is in movement that the work finds vitality. Here, form becomes a field of experience—a way of thinking about color as living matter.

In the works of Damasceno and Nassar, this legacy is taken up through other pathways. Both artists displace objects and signs from ordinary life, establishing new perceptual logics that oscillate between the familiar and the strange, between rigor and improvisation. In this way, the works brought together for this exhibition constantly mobilize a state of surprise and paradox, in which color, line, and the everyday become agents of a sensitive gaze. Geometry—the guiding thread of the exhibition—is understood as a dynamic field, permeable to experience and gesture. 

The exhibition thus reaffirms the vitality of Brazilian art in its singular way of metabolizing influences, expanding them toward life. In Mosquera’s words: “Nonetheless, this unique case of concrete art’s influence on one of today’s richest art scenes has manifested itself more in the way Brazilians contested it—disorganizing it with great inventiveness—than in the way they followed it.”