Hélio Oiticica Tate Modern

Culture is about communication. It can’t afford to be insular – and not least in a globalised era. Museums have been extending our opportunities to catch up with the contemporary in Africa, to tap in to the aesthetic of India, to find out about Far Eastern tastes. Now, it seems, it’s the turn of Latin America, and this time it’s the Tate that is keen to mug up.

Last year it introduced us to South American contemporaries in its collection in a Tate Liverpool show. This year the Colombian sculptress Doris Salcedo was chosen to create the Turbine-Hall commission. The completed project will be unveiled this autumn. And this week, an exhibition by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica arrives at Tate Modern.

The general public hasn’t heard of him – let alone attempted to pronounce his name (Oy-ta-seeka will do). And yet he is hailed not only as one of his country’s most innovative artists but as one of the most innovative artists of the postwar era, full stop.

How relevant is Latin American art to us? Of course we have all come across Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. But South America is about far more than a handful of cultish individuals, suggests Tanya Barson, the curator of international art at the Tate. “For too long,” she says, “there had been an unspoken assumption that ‘international’ meant Western European and North American.” Only towards the end of the 1990s did narrow geographical boundaries begin to be challenged. Tate curators,seeking to expand their Latin American collection beyond small pockets of Op-Art and kinetic pieces, made their first contemporary acquisition (a piece by Gabriel Orozco) in 1999. But it was after Tate Modern opened in 2000 that attention was really focused and a committee responsible for Latin American acquisitions was set up.

“From the point of view of the Tate collection, this felt very relevant,” Barson explains. “Latin America has a long tradition of contacts and exchanges with the States. It has a parallel art history that makes sense in the context of Modernism – but it is Modernism with a twist.”

This is certainly true of Oiticica. Even if you have never latched on to him before (there have been scattered opportunities, from a landmark London show at the Whitechapel in 1969 to the Tropicália exhibition at the Barbican last year) you will definitely find a lot of his aesthetic familiar. This was an artist who had a complete understanding of Modernism – and yet who pushed beyond its parameters into entirely new realms.

Oiticica was born in 1937. His life was abruptly ended by a massive heart attack in 1980. And yet, in the course of his brief but prolific career this Brazilian prodigy managed to hurtle from the traditional to the radical, from the formal to the free-flowing, from the Modernist to the PostModernist. With astonishing energy and uncompromising creativity he set about challenging the very nature of our artistic experience. He wanted to tear the picture down from the wall. He wanted to set art free.

Oiticica’s artistic career lasted only 25 years. But this new exhibition, coming from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, finds an even narrower focus. Showing works that (with a few significant exceptions) come from the first ten years of his practice, it focuses on his fascination for colour. Oiticica was as scrupulously theoretical as he was passionately obsessive about the subject. The spectator is invited to leap chronologically from one stage to the next of his experiments.

The first formal explorations of a teenager interested in Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian open the exhibition. But prismatic patterns and bright grids soon grow unstable. They lose their frames. Their structures start drifting apart. They float upon white spaces that become part of the picture. Slowly colour is cleansed and infused with light. A series of white-on-white tonal experiments, recently restored, is shown for the first time.

By 1959 the canvas has wandered off the wall. Geometries dangle in the middle of the gallery. Oiticica called these works “bilaterals”. He saw them as the starting point of a career during which he played with the origami-like patterns of his “spatial reliefs”. The spectator walks around them.

In the series of what he called “nuclei” (1960-66), arrangements of painted quadrangles are brought together to form a dangling maze through which, originally, visitors were supposed to wander. They have moved from being spectators to becoming participants.

Oiticica’s bolides – brightly painted wooden boxes filled with anything from sea shells to foam stuffing; glass vessels packed with powdered pigment – emphasise this. By creating objects that were supposed to be handled, the artist was seeking to dematerialise colour, to translate it into sensory stimuli and so expand our experience into a different realm.

Finally colour is set free. A series of capes, Oiticica’s brilliantly painted parangolés, fans out across the walls. This was art that was meant to be worn. As a video work records, colour takes off in a swirl of samba music, to swing, dance and whirl through the world.

This particular exhibition leaves Oiticica at this point (we must await the second half at a later time). But climb one floor up at the Tate and you will find a display dedicated to his time in London. This, along with the work of several of his contemporaries, includes a recreation of one of his famous beach-hut environments complete with plants, sand and parrots. An artist who began with abstract composition has moved, in the space of just a few years, to interactive installations. The colours of Mondrian are now embodied in Brazilian macaws.

It should be exhilarating. But it’s not. This entire exhibition feels stultified. Oiticica was a rebel. During his life he shunned the system. He seldom engaged with dealers and galleries. And now you can see why. It’s not the fault of curators that this show feels false. It’s the fault of the museum set-up.

Visitors can no longer handle his bolides – they are far too fragile and precious. They can no longer walk through the mazes – they might damage them. The capes on the wall are like butterflies pinned in a box.

Even where recreations have been made and we are invited to participate, the excitement is lost. You end up rather sympathising with the poor installation parrots. The creatures that should be flaring across tropical landscapes are perched in a nasty sterile cage.

This may be a scrupulously academic, meticulously curated show, but it traps and tames the artist’s vision. Oiticica wanted colour to be like some wild creature. But here we see it as a zoo animal in an art-historical cage.

— Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colouris at Tate Modern, SE1 (020-7887 8888), from today.

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