Helio Oiticica: myth of the outlaw: a traveling exhibition recently highlighted the 1970s installations and film projects of the late Brazilian artist, most of them never publicly shown during his lifetime - Critical Essay - Biography

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

The Argentine artist and critic Eduardo Costa, in an appreciation of the last decade of Oiticica's life, writes of Oiticica's addiction to cocaine: "Because I saw him at different stages in his life I can say that he was quite destroyed by New York City's way of life, or perhaps by the way he was not included in it.... And so he went further and further into drugs." In his notebooks, Oiticica acknowledged the psychological isolation endemic to the use of cocaine and, although he found a way to turn the substance of his addiction into art, his health deteriorated. There were at first, like warnings, one or two small strokes. He returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1978. Costa himself moved to Rio at about the same time, in flight from the recurrent military oppression in Argentina. He and Oiticica saw each other almost daily over a two-year period in the company of a group of artists, musicians and intellectuals. Costa recalls that Oiticica heeded the warnings of his doctors, ran on the beach at Ipanema and enjoyed a healthy diet but, on occasion, reverted to cocaine. And so Helio Oiticica died young, of a stroke, in 1980. He was 43 years old. (12)

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A third-generation radical and intellectual, Helio Oiticica was born in 1937, son of an entomologist photographer and grandson of an anarchist philologist. By the age of 20, he had produced a series of handsome paintings and drawings that suggest the influence of European modernists, including Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, whose work was known and admired firsthand in Brazil since the beginning of the Sao Paulo biennials in the early 1950s.

In 1961, Oiticica's exploration of the retinal experience of color in monochromatic paintings of saturated hue and Constructivist design led him to detach paintings from the walls on which they traditionally depend. Oiticica and his colleague Lygia Clark were soon recognized as among the leading artists of the Neo-Concrete movement in Rio de Janeiro, as distinct from the industrial and rationalist design-oriented Concretists of Sao Paulo. Oiticica and Clark introduced a humanistic engagement to the experience of art, a matter of intuition, of the senses.

Effectively altering the experience of painting by challenging the nature of its support, he began to exhibit painted boxes and glass bottles containing natural pigments along with other objects that carried a sense of physical history. He called them bolides. He then turned his attention to environments of psychological potency that were to be entered, which he called penetrables, and in 1964 developed a kind of banner or cape known as parangole, a participatory structure of fabric intended to eliminate the barrier between art and life. As he became increasingly involved in the samba schools of Carnival, which took root in the quarters of the marginalized poor of Brazil, his reputation as an artist of the people grew. In 1967, Oiticica constructed a celebrated environment, Tropicalia, at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. Tropicalia became an art movement, a celebration of Brazilian cultural identity in a time of military oppression that rapidly translated into a musical phenomenon led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.